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by gambiting 1775 days ago
Even in a PHEV that effect is very noticable. I have a Volvo XC60 T8, 2.2 tonne SUV, and 10k miles in the brake pads are like new. When I had the car serviced recently all pads measured the same thickness as new pads - I'm 100% convinced it's because I just use regenerative breaking all the time, extremely rarely engaging actual brakes. In a car this heavy the pads should be at least half gone after 10k miles, but since they are rarely used they just don't wear out.

>>Tire wear, well, from what I can tell electric cars seem to chew through tires more quickly due to the weight of the vehicles and the high torque.

I think part of it is the incidental result of most electric cars being both very high torque and very high horsepower. Any 400bhp+ car is going to chew threw tyres quickly, and that's what a lot of the big expensive EVs are. I'd like to see if something like the the Leaf or ID3 use tyres anywhere near as quickly - I suspect very much not.

2 comments

The value priced EVs typically come with narrow low rolling resistance tires that have the kind of friction coefficient that tends to get online comment sections whipped into a frenzy of pearl clutching about safety when poor people buy them for their 20yo ICE cars. It's hard to make a 1 for 1 comparison with the luxury EVs that use soft wide tires to take advantage of all that torque.

Nitpick: Most EVs are pretty low horsepower. You just don't care because you have ~100% of it available at any RPM.

Not as quickly as the Teslas, but my 21K mile LEAF is due for front tires soon. That’s significantly sooner than OE tires on a typical competitive car.