[dahfizz]

Threads like this read like EVs are double or more the weight of an ICE car.

EVs are a couple hundred pounds heavier in average than an equivalent ICE car. In terms of road wear, it's still a rounding error compared to industrial trucks.

[rhn_mk1]

The road wear is said to be proportional to the fourth power of axle load. http://www.cyclelicio.us/2014/fourth-power-rule-road-tax/

That means you deal twice the damage by increasing weight by only 20%. Seems in line with electric car weight difference.

[dahfizz]

Yeah, that's my point. A single garbage truck is going to do more wear on the roads than thousands of passenger vehicles. Anything besides industrial vehicles is negligible.

[amelius]

A garbage truck has many tires to distribute the load. Also they accelerate/decelerate differently.

[dsfyu404ed]

The rear tandems of a semi or heavier straight truck (garbage truck, dump truck, etc) occupy roughly the same road area as your car and may be carrying the weight of ~10x your car. The contact pressure is also much higher (100+psi tires vs your 20-40 or so).

[dahfizz]

Per OP's report, what matters is axle load.

A typical garbage truck has 2 or 3 axles. Let's assume 3 to be conservative. A fully loaded garbage truck weighs around 50,000 pounds. That's 16.6k pounds per axle, vs a Tesla Y's 2.2k pounds per axle.

Doing the math, a single garbage truck does as much road wear as ~3,300 teslas.

[Gibbon1]

Yeah turns out an electric drive train is much lighter than a gasoline one which offsets the battery weight somewhat. Gasoline engines aren't light, nor are the transmissions. Currently I think the weigh penalty is about 15-20%.

My guesstimate is if they can increase the energy density of batteries by 30-50% the weight penalty will disappear. Some of the reduction is the weight reduction of the battery and some is due to cascading effects on the rest of the car.

[cbsmith]

"couple of pounds heavier"??!?! That's understating it.

Seriously, a Model 3 is ~500 lbs heavier than Honda Accord, and a Model Y is significantly heavier than a Model 3.

[dahfizz]

Typo, fixed. I could have sworn I typed "couple hundred pounds".

But to your point, a bmw 430 is also around 500 pounds heavier than a Honda Accord. Nobody sees a BMW and freaks out about tire wear. But people seem to hyperfixate on any small negative of EVs.

[cbsmith]

> But to your point, a bmw 430 is also around 500 pounds heavier than a Honda Accord.

At the heaviest weights, yes, but the heaviest Accord weight and the lightest 430i weight are only 148 lbs apart... and the Model Y can weigh in almost 400 lbs heavier than the heaviest of 430i's.

> Nobody sees a BMW and freaks out about tire wear.

You mean, so long as it's not an EV? ;-)

Seriously, nobody freaks out about a BMW 430i's tire wear, because that of the branding of the car. It's like freaking out over coffee increasing your heart rate.

> But people seem to hyperfixate on any small negative of EVs.

We're obviously talking to different people. At least the folks I know talk about how crazy heavier cars keep getting across the board (case in point: https://www.capitalone.com/cars/learn/finding-the-right-car/...).

[sliken]

Be fair, those aren't comparable cars. BMW Model 3 and the Tesla model 3 are pretty similar in size, weight, and cost. The fastest of both is AWD and the Tesla is 4072 pounds and the M3 Competition and M3 Touring (the 2 variants with AWD) are 3924 pounds to 4116.

The non performance models are similar as well, the current BMW 3141-4023 pounds (the AWD are of course on the heavier side, and the Tesla model 3 is 3814 pounds.