I bet there are statistics on just how much space is wasted on cars (roads, parking space) but I don’t have them handy. It will probaly pretty maddening when only considering “urban” areas but I wonder if it’s more or less of 1% of the world’s total landmass …
I know that in the UK 1.3% of our land is road, so maybe the global average isn’t much lower
I want public transport more than anything, but where I live there’s little to none, I can’t do anything about that other than voting for parties that apparently have little chance to win. What I can do is buy an electric car, sue me.
Unless we’re talking solar, wind or something else clean and renewable, EVs don’t eliminate emissions, they just move them somewhere else.
That’s still much better though. Lots of people die from lung cancer and other lung related illnesses due to pollution in cities. Also, if emissions are concentrated somewhere else it’s more economical to treat them, instead of being spread out in an urban area.
This whole crap that something has to be 100% perfect to be a proper solution has to end.
Exactly, also electricity from fossil fuels is still cleaner, the process at the plant is way more efficient and way more scrutinized (check every car and every producer and every user or check plants, which works best?)
Well obviously less vehicles of any kind would be a benefit. Cities designed around people with public transport options would always beat out a society where everyone has a car. I think there is more push on this in Europe than the US, where outside of the big cities public transport is virtually non-existent. Urban planning should emphasis central districts to create transport hubs where people eat / work / shop and therefore demand to make public transport. And outside of that cycle routes, footpaths etc.
But electric vehicles are still much better than ICE vehicles. Over their life time they account for 1/4 emissions (depending on how power is generated) and those emissions can be more effectively captured. And of course renewables bring the emissions down year on year. There is a direct correlation between NOx emissions and respiratory deaths so this is a good thing. Also less CO2 emissions and contribution to global warming. Also, particulates are much less - brakes are not the primary source of deceleration in an EV (regen is) so pads don’t see anything like as much use as an ICE car. Some EVs are even going back to using drum brakes where the dust is basically captured inside an enclosed drum. The tyres also aren’t any worse or faster wearing than ICE vehicles so in that regard it’s even.
Agree with almost everything you said here, EVs are definitely significantly cleaner than ice vehicles but you’re oversimplifying a little when it comes to brakes and tires. Some cheap evs are going to drum brakes but the vast majority of modern evs are using significantly larger brakes with softer pads than equivalent gas vehicles due to the acceleration offered by electric vehicles. Its possible that as time goes on and electric vehicles make up a bigger market share of economy cars this will change.
The bigger issue with clean EVs is the insane amount of rubber they use in their tires. I’m not sure where you’ve heard the tires on EVs are roughly equivalent to ICE, sue to the weight increase EVs use much bigger tires that wear down faster than gasoline vehicles and I’ve read a few studies about the possibility of these tires throwing more “marbles” or small pieces of rubber than their lighter ICE counterparts. All this not to mention the increased road maintenance required by doubling the weight of the average car in the last thirty has me concerned were trading toxic fumes for other forms of pollution.
I wouldn’t say Volkswagen ID cars (ID.3, ID.4, ID.Buzz), Audi Q4 e-tron are cheap cars but they’re using drum brakes. Drum brakes are actually more efficient since a pad isn’t rubbing against the plate, impeding efficiency. It’s also easier to integrate electronic parking brakes into the mechanism. I imagine other EV makers will follow suit if for no other reason than it saves money and weight.
As for tyre wear, I’ve already pointed to links from the RAC & Kwikfit who I trust know what they’re talking about. I suppose if you drove an EV like you just stole it you might suffer wear but I imagine most people don’t drive like that and actually drive their car anticipating the need for acceleration / deceleration to maximize regen. And that style of driving also happens to reduce wear on the tyres.
I’m tired of people looking at me crazy because I keep suggesting we need better public transportation rather than fucking electric cars. We are 100% going to replace every car in America with an E.V before we ever expand access to public transportation. And we will do this because the car manufacturers stock prices will go up if we do.
There are pros and cons to each solution but this one satire is obviously biased one way.
Relatively split reaction, huh? Interesting.
So, I think it’s kind of naive to believe that we can solve everything tomorrow/very soon with public transportation. It’s pretty easy to believe that if you define the rural/urban divide to include a lot of suburbs as urban, which sort of, gets away from the bleakness of the situation a little bit, I think. I think I remember somewhere around a third being split between each form, with a little less being in the suburbs compared to either rural or urban, so it’s pretty evident that, even of a portion of the people that work in cities, live just outside cities, those people live with untenable densities for public transportation. I think that’s solvable, right, in the long term, by local municipalities, over the course of the next 40-50 years give or take, because infrastructure gets decroded, needs to be replaced, and you can replace it in the meantime just by reworking the standards, something which is generally self-evident to voters as a better solution and creates a positive feedback loop as long as people aren’t completely propagandized to.
The only problem I think you might encounter with this is that it’s very hard to get this going in a place that doesn’t already support it at all. It’s much easier to create public transport if you have somewhere to go, if you’re already on the outskirts of a large city. If you make a walkable place in the midst of a collection of townships and municipalities which don’t support that, you’ve become less permeable to cars, and those other municipalities need to provide public transport that goes to your town where they can spend money on your goods and stimulate your local economy, and that doesn’t strike me as something likely to happen. This is the structure of lots of shitholes in america already, because the lack of density kind of lends itself towards a fragmented series of municipalities joined together with dogshit social services rather than a singular contiguous government.
But, then, I also think it’s kind of insane the level to which we accept cars and car-centric infrastructure as inevitable even within this context. If you want to slowly increase density, I think there’s really a lot of progress that could be made, not specifically by the technology of EVs, but just by making cars smaller. Like, we already see that in europe, japan, whatever. EVs have bigger batteries on average, sure, but you’re not going to see people get up in arms about the increased pollution that E-bikes cause, and that’s the same fundamental technology of a battery electric vehicle in a different form factor. I feel like the first and most obvious step towards a solution would be decreasing the absolutely extreme size of cars in the US, in any case. You can still be compatible with your 15 mile city outskirts shithole suburb while driving a car that’s the size of a geo metro or smaller. It’s worked so far for me, anyways. Decreasing size totally strikes me as a bigger win than transitioning to EVs, a higher priority, maybe, though, they’re not really mutually exclusive in any way. Smaller lighter cars can be safer in crashes because of the decreased mass, decreased need for stopping power, they can be more gas efficient, possibly much more gas efficient, especially with hybrid technologies. It strikes me as a much simpler solution, one that legitimately requires less production to solve the issue, is more efficient.
Definitely so it’s not a binary all or nothing - one way or another. It needs to be governments putting their fingers on the scale and pushing development in a way that lowers CO2 emissions, energy use, reliance of fossil fuels etc. I think some countries like the US are too far hooked on cars to think they’ll change over night to optimal urban designs, so even pushing people to use EVs, install solar on their houses etc. is a positive over what exists now. Perhaps in due course, they’ll change but it needs political will - to increase urban density, change building codes, create hubs etc.
There’s not enough lithium for evs either.
They conveniently left off the 3 month oil changes, grease fittings, transmission fluid, gear oil, brake fluid, power steering fluid, etc. Cars have a lot of fluids and after market additives that people use to try and pass the inspection tests. Also the corruption where people pay off the inspectors to make sure the vehicle passes
I’m sure that there’s a decent chunk of corruption with inspections, but there are also states like Arkansas where we don’t ever have to get our vehicles inspected… It’s absurd how shitty some of the cars and trucks are that I see regularly.
Neat an excuse to change nothing in a fuck cars space…
The point is that electric cars are shit, have never been a solution to anything, and that they shouldn’t be presented as one, doubly so when public transport exists.
No dude, the point is that half-measures and baby steps aren’t enough. Our planet is quickly becoming uninhabitable for us. We need radical change.
We will get air purifying headphones with a hardware subscription instead.
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Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good
P.S. electric cars are here to save Cars, not the environment
I live in a city with about 2 million people. It has major sprawl and lots of guys with big trucks to compensate for little personality. The city has a brown haze floating over it that is a result of tailpipe emissions.
EVs may not be the solution to climate change, but they are helping my local area with air pollution. Well… they would if they were more popular. Every time a local buys an EV, ten more prosthetic penises are sold.
Do you ever get tired of being angry at everything?
Yes, pollution is a big problem. Not sure why so many people ignore it.
I keep it simple and use the communal traffic(bus/train) instead. I have never bought a car and don’t miss it as i live near the things I need grocery store and workplace(bike 5km).
EVs also help with the brake disc “dust” since a lot if the braking is “regenerative breaking” done by the electric motor and does not use the brake pads at all. They require less maintenance, and have fewer parts in them, so less manufacturing materials. With very few exceptions, they are also smaller vehicles with more safety features which should result in fewer pedestrian casualties.
Obviously having no vehicles at all would be even better at solving these issues, but that’s not practical for our current reality. Maybe in 100 years.
I will say that “autopilot” features should absolutely be outlawed and cause nothing but trouble to everyone.
I will say that “autopilot” features should absolutely be outlawed and cause nothing but trouble to everyone
Autopilot is a pretty broad category. I like the autopilot on my car, which is nothing like elon musks self driving bullshit. It only turns on on supported highways and uses lidar instead of machine vision. All it does is maintain a following distance and follow the curve of the road. On Long drives it stops your foot and arms being fatigued and frees up a lot more mental space to look out for road hazards, it has a camera in the wheel that makes sure you have your eyes pointed at the road. I don’t see any risks for this sort of simple autopilot but it does have a lot of upside.
I’d definitely rather ride the train if it didn’t cost 200 dollars and come once a day, but until it gets better(and I’ve been writing a lot of letters to my officials) my self driving ev is the best alternative.
Brake dust is bad but tire dust is the real issue
Emissions Analytics has found that adding 1,000 pounds to a midsize vehicle increased tire wear by about 20 percent, and also that Tesla’s Model Y generated 26 percent more tire pollution than a similar Kia hybrid. EVs’ more aggressive torque, which translates into faster acceleration, is another factor that creates more tire particulate mile for mile compared to similar internal combustion engine cars.
Which market is it that is producing smaller EVs? They’re all just regular cars turned EV, which means they’re heavier and you can’t feature-rich your way out of physics as per pedestrian safety
China
100 years is ambitious only if you want to remove all of the cars. There are plenty of milestones that can be attained fairly quickly :
- Smaller cars. Less energy, materials, etc. Safer for other road users (you don’t get hit on your vital organs, better vision for the driver and everyone else since pedestrians can easily see over the car).
- Less car use is available now, if we just empower the alternatives (make bike usage safe, make public transport good enough)
- No more cars in cities. Bikes + trains mostly do the job, you can rent a car if you leave the city, or park it at the outskirts.
- Even smaller cities used to be liveable without a car. This could be brought back, but that’s probably a tough hill to climb.
EVs may even lead to increased tire debris.
I wouldn’t doubt people driving EVs may even have less sustainable lifestyles in general because of their absolved guilt from driving the EV. Not that the average driver matters much when considering cargo and air traffic.
This is actually backed by research.
Yes, your average driver creates a fraction of the emissions of the average flight.
But there are hundreds of millions of drivers in the US. Billions of car trips. And only tens of thousands of flights.
Changing the impact of one driver is small. Systemically changing the impact of tens of millions of drivers adds up.
But less brake pad wear. The regenerative braking reduces a lot of the need for brake pads.
Source?
Every mechanic who’s worked on one? Everyone who’s owned one?
Well, here’s a source to counter your anecdote
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/4a4dc6ca-en/index.html?itemId=/content/publication/4a4dc6ca-en
Although lightweight EVs emit an estimated 11-13% less PM2.5 than ICEV equivalents, heavier weight EVs emit an estimated 3-8% more PM2.5 than ICEVs. In the absence of targeted policies to reduce non-exhaust emissions, consumer preferences for greater autonomy and larger vehicle size could therefore drive an increase in PM2.5 emissions in future years with the uptake of heavier EVs.
Thats pm2.5 in general, not specifically from break pads
