[ChiefNotAClue]

To those wondering about tire wear:

"Despite the slightly higher levels of tire wear from EVs, brake dust was found to be more unhealthy, as brake dust is much more likely to become airborne (>40%) than tire wear is (1-5%). So EVs create a lot less of the worse thing, and a little more of the less-bad thing."

[llampx]

I recently bought an EV and love it. I barely ever touch the brakes and the wheels stay clean, unlike my old BMW where the front wheels turned gray from brake dust very quickly.

Some comments here are looking for a 100% perfect solution, which doesn't exist. Transportation is polluting. Sorry but even public transportation is polluting, even if it is more efficient when its above a certain utilization. Where I live, some buses are EV and it is a joy to ride them compared to diesel ones.

With an EV there is less local pollution, less noise pollution, more dynamic response when needed and no need for wasteful oil "changes" where the old, dirty, useless oil doesn't just magically disappear.

[jvm___]

Is tire wear worse for aquatic life than brake dust?

[jabl]

There is an additive called 6PPD added to tires to prevent them from degrading in the atmosphere, and it has been found that when this thing reacts with ozone in the air it forms another compound 6PPD-quinone which is highly toxic to some fishes. Weirdly enough it's highly toxic to some species of salmon but not to other salmon species.

Presumably there's work ongoing to find an less damaging replacement, but I haven't heard of any.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6PPD

[cyberax]

Tire wear right now is worse, because tires contain an anti-oxidant that gets oxidized into a compound that is highly toxic to aquatic life.

The work is underway to standardize on a replacement. This time with even more tests.

[chneu]

I wonder if this will be like lead in av-gas. Lol.

[cyberax]

Not really. There are plenty of possible replacements, the industry wants to make sure that _this_ time it won't hurt some Australian finches if tires are exposed to moonlight or something.

[verisimi]

So it's even more good news. Yet another way EVs are better.

[HenryBemis]

It's not you, it's definitely me. I cannot tell if there is irony or a 'straight-faced' comment that you wrote.

Either way, like always, time will tell. We (humans) almost never 'get it right the first time'. And perhaps EVs have been around for quite a while now, it's still 'a while'. So I wouldn't be surprised if the lobby for "7PPD" (or whatever replacement) convinces us that "7PDD" is the best and even makes fish taste better, only to find out that it causes terminal cancer (see smoking, sugar, etc.)

[rasz]

unless you are a salmon

https://ecology.wa.gov/blog/january-2023/saving-washington-s...

[scuderiaseb]

So putting this aside, the elephant in the room is still the weight of the EVs, tire wear is one thing but the roads are also being worn at a much faster rate due to the weight of the cars. When EVs do have to brake and regenerative is not enough it needs to stop more inertia due to this high weight.

[JumpCrisscross]

> the elephant in the room is still the weight of the EVs

The elephant in the room for road wear are trucks [1]. Cars are almost negligible.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

[bryanlarsen]

A Tesla 3 is 5% heavier than a BMW 3. First generation ICE conversions were heavy. Cars properly designed from the ground up for EV aren't as much.

[scuderiaseb]

Yeah but they should get lighter ideally and not heavier because the BMW 3 ICE has also gotten unreasonably heavy.

I'm a huge proponent of biking and electric bikes but there is too bad infrastructure, storage, safety concerns etc that are not being addressed properly. For instance I wish I could buy a Cargo bike and use that for grocery shopping and most other transportation of my kids but I don't have room in our bike storage (where I've had two bikes stolen) and I don't have room in our storage room and live in an apartment. The cars parking take up more square meters than the squaremeters of the building or close to it while the bike storage is a fraction of that.

[tpm]

> the roads are also being worn at a much faster rate due to the weight of the cars.

Are they actually being worn out at a much faster rate because of more EVs? Do we have any data?

[llampx]

It is amazing how much concern trolling there is about EVs on a site like this.

[tpm]

One has to wonder who creates a fresh account just to troll against EVs. Fossil bots perhaps.

[scuderiaseb]

I'm not a bot but I regret posting that as my first comment and to be honest I didn't read the article before it was just my thoughts from prior knowledge. I've been on Hacker News for many years but decided a week ago to make an account.

Still you have a good point, one should be skeptical of what is written by bots.

[tpm]

Right. So as the other poster mentioned the elephant in the room regarding road damage are trucks. And as a fellow biker I'm completely with you on infrastructure, but still see EVs as a massive improvement on ICEs.

[yencabulator]

What's even worse is we're seeing some relatively-new accounts basically commenting LLM summaries of the article; it definitely looks like a way to "fake age" accounts.

[llampx]

Can't rule out automated manipulation and bots on any social media site these days.

[tstrimple]

Same thing happens with renewables. Every single article either positive or negative about solar or wind you'll inevitably see the "But the sun doesn't always shine! Nuclear is the only possible solution!" style comments.

[s1artibartfast]

It's a pretty natural response to highlight concerns if something is being shoved down your throat.

[pjc50]

> shoved down your throat

This nearly always means "mentioned" rather than any kind of coercion. The ICE phaseout is still something like a decade away at the most optimistic in Europe and much, much further away in the US.