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Are Electric Cars the Solution?
(www.resilience.org)
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this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2024
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One thing that the article didn't touch on, since it was focused on input costs, is the extra pollution from using EVs.
EVs are substantially heavier than ICEs of the same class, due to the battery. This leads to extra wear on the tires, break pads, and road surface -> even more micro plastics and particulate air pollution.
We need to reduce our ecological footprint, not merely change it from oil to reactive metals.
Brake pads tend to last longer due to regenerative braking. The rest of your point stands.
I never changed my pads in 65k miles so that's not true sorry.
They are on average slightly heavier but we're talking 100-200kg. That's nothing, 10-15%, definitely not "substantially". Less if you add fuel to the ICE.
There's not any extra pollution. There's an investment cost and then tyre wear. Which you get from an ICE. Along with, you know, all the pollution from the combustion engine. Which is at most 24% efficient (more likely middle teens) and only continues to pollute rather than electric vehicles which don't.
Electric cars may not be the ultimate solution but they're a damn sight better than the status quo so let's stop this kind on hysterical posting eh?
The ‘substantially heavier’ is doing a lot of work there, given the change is only about 5 to 10% on average and typically EV’s are still not the heaviest vehicles in their same class. Compared to the car obesity epidemic in North America, the drivetrain is irrelevant. A European EV for instance is nearly always going to far, far lighter than a modern US gas car.
Also, becuse if the road degradation is exponentially tied to tire wheight it is almost always a function of trucks, busses, and freeze thaw cycles, cars tend to be to light to cause significant share of the damage.
Break dust is an odd thing to bring up, seeing as one of the other common gripes with EVs is that they use their breaks so extremely rarely that they corrode and might be ineffective in an emergency.
Tire dust is an factor, but again one that’s more impacted by the increase in North America’s car size than drivetrain and which is reduced by getting cars back to sane sizes and out of dense areas like cities, not pretending that a 80 to 90% reduction in one of the largest causes of climate change is somehow the same.