| I have no idea about ice, but road degradation is fairly well studied (admittedly I'm learning about it as I find these): https://higherlogicdownload.s3.amazonaws.com/IPWEA/c7e19de0-... > For example, a vehicle with an axle weight of 1000 kg is considered to cause 16 times the damage compared with a vehicle with an axle weight of 500 kg. It seems the 4th power law might actually be more accurate than I thought. If the vehicles can damage the road proportional the fourth power of their weight, surely there is significantly more wear on the wheels (the only part touching the road) than just a linear increase in weight? My hunch, and again I want someone to provide a more accurate model, is the wear would be proportional the third power of weight. EDIT: I found something, and it is complicated. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/16878140177000... Figure 6 is what we're interested in, although you won't understand it without reading everything before it. It's definitely not linear, but it seems to roughly come out to something like the 3rd power, but it really depends (honestly you should click that link, there are so many variables). EDIT EDIT: Here we go! https://www.academia.edu/24153619/Tyre_Wear_Model_Validation... So it seems to be somewhere between the second and third power of weight. Assuming tire wear is directly proportional to particle emissions (I have no idea if this is true), that would mean (using the 80% of emissions coming from tires number cited in an earlier comment, and EVs being roughly 10% heavier on average) that EVs are actually worse for air quality! This is lumping together brakes and tires though, which could be wrong. Although I am certain there is at least a second power effect from braking from vehicle weight. But as another commenter mentioned, regenerative braking (while not unique to electric vehicles, I think this is a fair contrast) will benefit the EV greatly here. Also it's worth mentioning that while EVs lose, it's not by a huge amount (but it seems to be enough to be measurable). So like most things, "it's complicated." |