[teemur]

> road wear and tire wear and hence micro plastics, scale to the fourth with vehicle weight,

(Emphasis mine) Do you have a source for this? I do not see how this specific claim could be true, and I am not sure how exactly that needs to be modified to make it true.

I mean, if you take a vehicle that weights one ton and double the number of wheels, that specific claim says that the road/tire wear would not change, as the vehicle weight stays the same. Further, doubling the wheels can't easily be distinguished from splitting the load to two vehicles with half the weight, which should reduce wear & tear of each vehicle to one sixteenth, totaling to one eighth. So there is kind of a contradiction.

And as a sanity check, a passenger car weights ~10^3 kg. A large truck weights ~10^4. So a truck would wear the road something like as much as 10 000 passenger cars. That's a bit hard to believe.

So the actual law might be something like tear & wear scales to the fourth of the weight on a single wheel. But even that leaves something to hope, as I think you need to assume similar wheels. So maybe the actual law has something to do with pressure on the road?

[galangalalgol]

The original fourth power law relates to axle loads, which as you point out is not the same as what I said. So we should get rivian to add a lot more wheels on those amazon trucks. But even if they put as many on as they could fit, the capacity and load is so much higher than what each person getting a delivery would use, you are still in the hole vs a normal ev not to mention a trike just big enough to pop over to the warehouse at the train station to pick up your packages.

Edit: forgot to paste link https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

[tonyedgecombe]

>That's a bit hard to believe.

The way I heard it explained was imagine a toddler jumping up and down on your bed. They could do this indefinitely. Now imagine a rugby player doing the same. The bed wouldn’t last very long.