A friend and I were talking about the weight of EVs and we assumed my EV would be heavier than his car, a BMW 3. The BMW was heavier. Maybe the average EV is heaver than the average ICE, but if you compare what the EV has replaced for that owner, it might be that the EVs aren't noticeably heavier. I just checked the car I had before the Leaf - a Subaru Outback. It was also heavier.
I don't think that taxing vehicles based on weight is the right option though. If the pollution is from tires, then tax tires. Do this based on the compounds present in that tire. If someone drives rashly, doing donuts all over the place, then they as a greater polluter will need to pay more. I don't really know anything about Formula 1, but get them to do the race on a single set of tires. Not for pollution, but for solutions that might make it into regular tires.
Denmark used to tax cars based on weight as it was considered that weight was equal to wear and tear on the roads. Although that logic should probably have been weight * distance driven.
Weight * distance is actually literally fun for governments to implement.
Why?
Because it gives them more taxes, bigger government and as a bonus more spying on citizens.
The Dutch government has been talking about this type of tax for decades. The idea is to put a mandatory live-tracking device in every car that sends data to the government about where you are at all times.
Currently the tax is based on weight and type of energy source of the car and some of the highest taxes on fuel in the world. This boils down to the same as the weight * distance tax. But why keep it simple if you could complicate it further AND get free live spying as a bonus?
I seem to recall when selling cars the V5 transfer also has a mileage (so easy to attribute)
It isn't precisely easy (MOT and tax timings won't line up etc) and arrears rather than advance etc. We definitely have enough data to do a fair approximation - just high operational overheads to collect
It's legitimate to track entry and exit on national borders though. A tax exception based on entry/exit times is doable and better than constant geo tracking.
> The Dutch government has been talking about this type of tax for decades. The idea is to put a mandatory live-tracking device in every car that sends data to the government about where you are at all times.
God damn.
I would have gone with "mandatory service where the odometer is sent to the government, and government keeps track of when last service was done and fines owners who are late"
Cars get sold, eventually. You put the odometer reading on the paperwork to transfer the car. Check that against tax records. Purchaser has incentive to check that the recorded mileage is correct, otherwise they’ll have to pay the tax. The odometer is already tamper-resistant. Not perfectly so, and there is fraud, but there is always tax fraud.
It's also a type of fraud which is fairly easy to detect. If a car is recorded as driving just 2000 miles per year, yet freeway cameras detected it driving 100 miles every weekday all year, open a fraud case.
> The Dutch government has been talking about this type of tax for decades. The idea is to put a mandatory live-tracking device in every car that sends data to the government about where you are at all times.
Why would they need a tracking device for this? If Google is to be believed the Dutch government requires periodic vehicle inspections. Couldn't they just go by the odometer difference between inspections to get the mileage?
They want the live tracking service because they want to change the price per mile driven based on congestion on the road. So your trip from Maastricht to Eindhoven will be a lot cheaper at 2am than it will be at 8am.
The Netherlands already has one of the highest fuel taxes in the world. There's pushback from fuel station owners near the borders because many people fill up their cars abroad.
My current favourite pet policy (UK) is to introduce a zero rate tax band on energy, to help those least well off, and have a higher band beyond some average consumption.
You encourage people to use less, and also tax things such as EVs that use more electricity.
Of course it doesn't quite capture everything discussed though.
I think just taxing the tires is the solution! More wear on roads should closely correlate with more wear on tires, and each tire likely has a lifetime determined by weight * distance. You need to account for tire structure, but even if you tax all tires the same, it should be a good approximation of what we're looking for.
This is a good way to incentivise people to buy the shittiest tyres they can and stretch them well past usable life because it’ll cost them a motza to replace.
One potential way to do this would be to weigh the tires at sale and charge a tax based on the weight of the tire. When the tire is ultimately disposed of, a refund is issued based on the weight of the disposed tire.
This would encourage both avoiding tire wear and proper disposal of tires. That assumes obviously that people don't cheat the system by making tires heavier somehow when returning them.
Seeing as these two cars are similar in size, capacity, and performance (0-60 mph in 4.2 s), it is nice to see that the electric option weighs about the same as an ICE car of similar specs.
The Leaf, of course, is a very budget car that can hardly be compared to the BMW 3 series.
While EVs are just as bad as ICE cars on the tyre microplastics front, they are at least slightly better in terms of brake dust thanks to regenerative braking.
I think the difference isn't so much between car models, it's the drivers behaviour that wears down the tyres. Something happens to drivers of cars that has the power to accellerate fast from 0. Electric wears down the tires faster because of how the average driver uses the pedals.
The Outback is also bigger and has more cargo capacity than the BMW 3 but likewise only weighs 100 pounds more.
The weight of electric cars is more proportional to their range than their size, and they also shed the ICE powertrain and exhaust/emissions systems, so the breakeven range where they weigh the same as an equivalent ICE car is a range of something like 200-300 miles. Which is why the BMW 3 and Tesla 3 have a similar weight.
The difference is that as new battery chemistries improve energy density, the weight of the electric car can go down. Whereas ICE powertrains are extremely mature with not a lot of low-hanging fruit, so significant improvements in power to weight ratio are less likely to be forthcoming.
Well and total vehicle weight impacts EV range far more than it does ICE range. So the leaf is both small and with shorter range but the gain is a smaller battery pack.
> as new battery chemistries improve energy density
You can have improved density today. You're just not going to like the charge and discharge characteristics very much. EVs have lots of multi variable problems due to their efficiency and utilization aims. To be fair it just is a harder problem to solve but the years of development and lack of clear gains are still showing obvious bottlenecks.
> so significant improvements in power to weight ratio are less likely to be forthcoming.
You can have vastly improved PWR now. Just ride a motorcycle. I think Power train Weight to Total Vehicle Weight is what you really want to think about. In either EV or ICE case there are still plenty of gains to be had here.
Not really relevant to your overall point, but I found it interesting that apparently F1 already tried that:
In 2005, tyre changes were disallowed in Formula One, therefore the compounds were harder as the tyres had to last the full race distance of around 300 km (200 miles). Tyre changes were re-instated in 2006, following the dramatic and highly political 2005 United States Grand Prix, which saw Michelin tyres fail on two separate cars at the same turn, resulting in all Michelin runners pulling out of the Grand Prix, leaving just the three teams using Bridgestone tyres to race.
They all could, but Ferrari built their car + strategy + drivers' style for multiple fast laps with multiple pit stops as the winning formula. Having just multiple tire changes without the same car, strategy and driver won't have the same results
Your first sentence implies there is some relevance of taking an arbitrary EV and comparing it to an arbitrary ICE. There's not... I am gonna bet anything your random EV is gonna be heavier than a Suzuki Swift.
No-one actually wants to do this but the answer is to tax fuel. UK road tax for example already taxes bigger/heavier cars more (albeit not particularly granularly), so there’s your weight component. Fuel consumption is a decent proxy for distance.
Obviously there’s some maths needed on how to apply the tax to both ICE and EVs, and to think about edge cases (super efficient but hard on tyres), although my gut says that likely the harder you are on tyres, the harder you’ll be on fuel.
I don't think you can tax tires high enough that it will make a difference, but the same is also true if we attempt to tax by weight. Any tax is going to be the equivalent of slapping €10 on a plane ticket. It's not enough to stop the behaviour, but might be enough to keep some people driving on dangerously worn down tires.
It also doesn't matter if the car is an EV or ICE, the behaviour we want to limit is driving. The idea of taxing the tires could of cause lead to development of tires that doesn't shed microplastic.
"We" as in a society that wants to reduce the amount of microplastics from tires (or who wants to reduce environmental impact as much as possible).
It's sadly also the same "we" that is more interested in preserving the status quo in the name of the al might holy economy as it exists today. The same "we" that doesn't want to upset voters. The same "we" who won't vote for the greener option because "we" can't imagine a future different from yesterday.
It seems a number of factors contribute to this beyond weight: how you drive (braking and accelerating aggressively), what conditions you drive in, the state of your tires, etc.
Weight seems to be one easy to understand and affecting factor. Why not start there?
Because the thing you're worried about is microplastics, which are directly proportional to tire wear regardless of whether the wear is from heavier vehicles or more miles driven or idiots doing donuts, so if you just tax the externality directly you don't have to worry about which thing is causing it.
Damage to the roads increases with the fourth power of axle weight. It follows that all passenger cars heavy or not, EV or ICE are insignificant for road-damage.
One could surmise that there is a similar relation with tire wear and therefore pollution from them as well.
But taxing tires is I think a good idea as it is a consumable and the wear and it's impact can be directly measured.
The problem I see with taxing tires is twofold:
- how is taxing going to solve this problem, it's unlikely that it is going to have a significant impact on driving
- can taxes be fed into tire research in a way that reduces the impact on the environment? Are there any solutions that need funding?
This reminded me of an old article I read about this from `Straight Dope` years ago (2006 in fact!)[0].
> Pollution studies in the Los Angeles basin in the 1980s concluded that more than five tons of breathable tire dust were released into the atmosphere there each day, and there’s no reason to think that figure’s gone down since.
I used to have an apartment abutting a parking garage and also above a busy three lane road.. the worst black dust and grime everywhere. Pretty sure moving out of that apartment probably added years back to my life.
I'm only making the assumptions that I can given what little information is contained in the original statement. We would need better quality information to make any further inferences.
Manufacturers aren’t making tires and then turning them into microplastics alone. Pretending consumers aren’t part of the problem is misleading.
We could add fees to tire manufacturers, but be honest: It will just get added to the price of the tire. That’s fine if the goal is economic incentives or funding remediation, but people start to lose interest in such fines as soon as they realize it comes out of their own pockets instead of from some imagined slush fund manufacturers are keeping to themselves. (See similar problems with conversations about tariffs, which people only like until they realize they will be paying for them.)
Manufacturers don’t make tires expecting them to not be driven on, so that’s besides the point, but regardless.
The goal should be to tax manufacturers so that there’s a strong incentive/an opportunity for market competition to produce tires that don’t shed microplastics.
plenty of places in America could have far better public transportation than they do. Take the Bay Area vs Switzerland
Size: Switzerland 15,940 mi², Bay Area 6,966 mi²
Population: Switzerland 8.85 million, Bay Area 7.76 million
So given that, the bay area is twice as dense as Switzerland
Miles of train tracks: Switzerland 3,241 miles, Bay Area ~300 miles?
SF Bay Area has a bay, Switzerland is all mountains so it's not like Switzerland is particularly easier to cover in public transportation
Plenty of other places in the USA could be covered in trains. LA for example used to have the largest public transit system in the world. It was all torn down between ~1929 and ~1975. A few lines have been created since but, the problem in the USA is, except for maybe NYC and Chicago, public transportation is seen as a handout to poor people instead of the transit the masses use like most saner places. (Most cities in Europe and Asia). Getting it back to that point seems nearly impossible. Building one track at a time, each taking 10-20 years with Nimbys fighting them all the way means the density of tracks always is too small to be useful, and so no usage.
is there a statistic that can show us the density distribution? my intuition says that the bay area would have a pretty gradual slope (people living mostly everywhere of mostly low density), whereas Switzerland would have lots of areas mostly uninhabited while having a few high concentration cities.
looking at the two respective largest cities: Zurich is about twice as densely populated as San Jose.
this has a huge impact on public transit viability.
I have, and everywhere people use public transit, it’s far more expensive or tedious to use a nice, big car. The houses, driveway, garage, and parking situation are inferior to those of 90% of the US, where you can easily take a Ford F150 or full size SUV almost anywhere you want.
Cars need space. Walking and bicycling (and public transit) need density. The environment for optimizing for each of those is completely opposite.
And once a person has invested in a car (the car itself and a home with enough space to store the car), and they use that car on a daily basis to commute to work or drop the kids off at school, they will be very unlikely to support taxes to pay for public transit, something they will almost never use, since they are already leaving the house in a car, they are going to do all their errands while out in a car.
And also have the best bike infrastructure in the world. I wonder how the average car miles driven per year compares between the Netherlands and, say, the US.
Consumers are not part of the problem. There is literally no action a consumer can take to ameliorate this situation because there are no tires produced that don't have this problem, and many consumers need to have a car to live.
Manufacture in country A and sell in country B. Or vice versa.
But never manufacture and sell in the same country, or the government might try to get you to pay for your negative externalities!
And now, there’s this annoying predicament where as you introduce more laws and more enforcement, you only cripple your own economy and rarely cause any significant improvement along the lines of what you hope. Look at Australia — we have all these appliance safety laws, but all of the appliances are made overseas and there’s no good point for the government to inspect and enforce compliance with those laws. I just bought a generic vacuum sealer from an online shop the other day. It was cheaper than buying at a brick & mortar store, even with delivery, and it definitely does not comply with Australia safety standards.
We’ve killed our local industry, and our economy is suffering for it. I don’t think the answer is to remove the safety/etc laws, but instead to tax all imports enormously. Be aggressive and unfair so that local industry is immediately viable. It’ll be painful, but it’s what most countries need. Comparative advantage turned out to be a terrible basis for international trade.
That was 40 years ago. In the interim capitalism has won and democracy is failing. Agreements like Montreal will never happen again, at least not in our lifetimes.
Look no further than the failure of the Paris Agreement and the ascent of authoritarianism worldwide. No one cares about environmental agreements, certainly not those in the rarified airs of billionaires, oligarchs, and other captains 9f industry.
> This and the Montreal Protocol wasn't achieved with a self-defeating attitude, though.
What's clear is that the attitudes of those of us in favour of such measures has only achieved the opposite is the last decade, as the user you're replying to has rightfully pointed out. Optimism has gotten us nowhere.
...and then the price is added to the price of tyres. Like, where do you think the money is going to go? People can't easily substitute their car use, and there's nothing out there replacing rubber that's road legal, so all you're doing is just adding a tax to car use.
You could do this just as easily with gas taxes, registration fees or any other system.
> People can't easily substitute their car use... so all you're doing is just adding a tax to car use.
So long as you don't have to pay the actual costs associated with your car use, why would you _want_ to find an alternative?
> You could do this just as easily with gas taxes, registration fees or any other system.
Registration fees tax ownership of a car, not use. IMO that's... not great; if you want to own a car you rarely drive, why should you pay for everyone else's pollution?
Gas taxes could be a fair way to target CO2 emissions, but (given heavy EVs don't pay them) are a poor way to target tyre particulate pollution.
As a response to particulate pollution specifically, a tyre tax is quite closely targeted (although possibly ill-advised for other reasons, as I mentioned in my comment).
I work from home and get paid an enormous salary. I literally do not care. But (1) in turn I make decisions which are purely convenience based because of that disposable income and (2) I'm just one vote.
The message you'll be selling to everyone else is: "hey, that multi-thousand dollar vehicle you use for getting to work because there's no public transport and your job requires you on-site? Pay more money to have it."
Or did the US not just have an entire election apparently determined by the price of eggs and the cost of living?
This is simply not true. Protectionism can have massive benefits. China making it impossible for foreign companies to gain serious ground there independently has been incredibly beneficial, else they wouldn't have done it. I happen to live in Korea which is similar in ways, and here too it's an enormously good thing for the country and its citizens.
The dream that protectionism is bad by definition is truly one of the biggest deceptions in economy of the post-Reagan era.
It's a great thing because it's basically funneling money from global megacorps to local corporations - which might still be huge, but nothing compared to e.g. Coca Cola or Google. This is a positive thing for everyone except for those companies' shareholders, and in a way the US as that's where almost all these megacorps are based.
This is really an important thing to realize, and I can't stress this enough. It's exactly like the EU imposing lots of regulations on Apple et. al. Apple isn't just going to take their bags and not sell there, nor have they raised prices to EU customers as a result of these rules. They simply comply.
Imagine if, say, Germany ruled that to sell Coke in Germany as an international company, you have to set up a 50-50 owned JV with an existing German company unrelated to Coke. You think Coke is neither going to give up on Germany nor are they going to raise their prices. They're simply going to be making less of a profit in Germany. Great for everyone. It has played out this way in every country with such rules in place.
If it's not already obvious, in a lot of places, when regulations are promoted to reduce waste and benefit public/environmental health, a large number of people will get angry and vote for those who'll want to maximize damage just because. If regulations promoting smaller cars were ever suggested in these places, some smiling politician would announce a mandate that vehicles be 5 tons or greater with anything smaller being banned, and compilations of people who worried about the environment would be circulated and heavily mocked online.
This is misunderstanding why people respond that way.
There are a lot of people who can't easily change their behavior, e.g. because your theory is that they should buy smaller cars but their business requires a vehicle that can carry heavy loads once a week and they can't afford to buy a separate vehicle for that so the larger vehicle has to be their daily driver. Then a tax meant to induce a change in behavior is received by them as an unavoidable tax hike, which they naturally resent and oppose, and because of the nature of politics they'll then propose the opposite of whatever you're trying to do to them.
What you really need to do is to make it more possible for them to do the thing you want. For example, right now if you want to have a modern compact car for most use and an old truck you use once a week for truck stuff, you have to register and insure two vehicles. That isn't currently economical, but it's what you want to happen so they're not just driving the truck at all times.
What you want to do is to make it economical. Only charge a registration fee for someone's primary vehicle and waive the cost for a second one, and make insurance work in such a way that having two vehicles doesn't have any higher liability premiums than driving the same total number of miles in one vehicle.
Then they can do what you want, and in fact have the incentive to, because the smaller car will save them gas most of the time but they still have the truck when they need it.
Incentives and penalties need to also exist to encourage manufacturers to offer smaller cars. Many domestic manufacturers are finding that giant luxury SUVs and 100+ kW high-end BEVs are highly profitable, and aren't even selling small and light vehicles at all for customers to choose.
Tyre wear is proportional to the fourth power of wheel load; reducing weight per wheel is the key here.
No, it's not.
You're taking a very loose rule of thumb for road surface wear and baselessly applying it to tires.
Tire wear follows the rubber the tire is made out of. Soft rubber wears faster. Once you control for that it's acceleration and braking loads (i.e. driving style) that dominate. After that is when weight starts mattering.
If what you said was even remotely true then heavy vehicles would get obviously less life out of tires compared to compact cars when in reality they get about the same
> If what you said was even remotely true then heavy vehicles would get obviously less life out of tires compared to compact cars when in reality they get about the same
Are you assuming that the tires of heavy vehicles have the same thickness as lighter vehicles? My bike has much thinner tires than any car, and they can last ten thousand kilometers.
You can tax producers, who will then increase prices. Or you can apply a tax to the product directly, and make it appear that the consumer is paying. But who is actually paying it is a question of tax incidence and a function of demand and supply elasticities.[1]
Making manufacturers pay is equivalent to making consumers pay.
The price is passed on to the consumer. The idea of “making manufacturers pay” in commoditized markets like tires is a feel-good myth. Any additional fees will go to the consumer price.
consumers are already paying heftily… in virginia we pay 4.56% on the value of the vehicle every year plus there is an electic vehicle tax and also million other taxes and fees added.
funny that state with “don’t thread on me” license plate is a bastion of socialism where you are not allowed to own a car but have to pay each year to the state for the right to own the car… the problem of course is all that insane amount of money collected will never be used for anything other than to pay for pensions for former government employees :)
Don't know about your state in particular, but most places in the US vehicle and fuel taxes are not enough to pay for road maintenance, and it is being subsidized out of other taxes.
My state realized a couple of decades ago that they were going to have the same kind of problem with their pension system and recreated it to be self-funding. They still have the old pensions to cover but at least they aren't continuing to dig themselves a deeper hole.
"We need to start making consumers pay for their negative externalities."
Alls I was trying to say is that consumers are already paying crazy money. 26 states have property taxes on cars! In VA even with all that PLUS a special tax for EVs PLUS most of the roads around the DC metro area are tollroads it is still not enough :)
I was being facetious talking about pension funds - what I was basically trying to say that whatever money is collected isn't going to where it should be going - if there is a budget shortfall (and wouldn't you know - there always is...) money gets appropriated to other things...
Where i live, 80% of all vehicles are passenger vehicles. I'm not sure that the extra wheels on semis would make up for that difference, especially with the slow increase in size of passenger vehicles.
Hard long lasting compounds don’t actually make up for fully loaded semi’s weight. They are much larger tires and with consistent heavy loads may only last 25k miles (or 100k with light loads).
So more and much larger tires and fairly similar lifespan = they liked make up a significant majority of tire pollution.
> The fourth power law (also known as the fourth power rule) states that the stress on the road caused by a motor vehicle increases in proportion to the fourth power of its axle load
I hate that the 4th power law is called a law. It's not a law of nature, it's a lazy curve fit.
Think about this...if car does 'x' damage to the road, 2 cars does 2x damage. 2 cars welded together side by side (axle to axle so the axle count stays the same) would also do 2x damage, but the 4th power law says it does 16x damage.
If it's wrong by a factor of 8 in the simplest thought experiment it's not a law. You can obviously make a heavy load act like many small ones, or concentrate a light load so it does a lot of damage.
Constant * X^4 just coincidentally went through the data in a single 1950s dataset...and for some reason we're calling it a law 70 years later, when it's really just a loose trend that we could easily break with a little engineering. And we probably have broken it...tires, roads, and vehicles have changed a fair bit in 7 decades.
If you're welding the two cars together connecting the axles you're still having 8 contact patches instead of 4, so the axle load is the same as 2 separate vehicles they're just moving in tandem.
You'd need to stack the two cars on top of each other to increase the axle load. In which case I'd say it's not obvious how much more the road wear would be without looking at data.
I'm not saying the 4th power law is absolute truth, I truly don't know what the wear patterns would look like on a modern surface. But your example isn't proving it wrong at all.
> Think about this...if car does 'x' damage to the road, 2 cars does 2x damage. 2 cars welded together side by side (axle to axle so the axle count stays the same) would also do 2x damage, but the 4th power law says it does 16x damage.
Are you removing the two inner wheels from the axle? Those would also support weight
A little off topic, but what are the roads releasing into the environment as they wear down? Asphalt is often somewhat radioactive since it's made from oil? Is there benzene in there? What is the scale of asphalt nanoparticles compared to tire nanoparticles?
Hi SideQuark. I'm writing you here as there's no contact email on your profile--I wanted to ask you if you ever tried a SAT solver on RomuTrio to find cycles (or you can give me some hints). I'm referring to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22457101.
You can write me at sebastiano.vigna@gmail.com. Thanks for any info!
BTW, thanks for explaining that you cannot prove things about a single permutation using random permutations--it's so obvious that it is very difficult to explain, and the same absurd argument pops over and over.
Your estimate isn't even close--you're off by about 4 orders of magnitude.
Fact: In California, the number of trucks is about 300K vs cars at 14M (about 40x).
Fact: California AADT on roads for trucks ranges from a couple of percent up to almost 50%. Very few roads have less than 10% AADT from trucks.
Fact: Damage to roads goes as fourth power of axle load.
Speculation: Given that tires are the primary means to transmit that damage to the roadway, it wouldn't surprise me if the trucks are responsible for the vast majority of tire particulates.
This seems like an easily corruptible idea. For example, who measures the negative externalities? Certainly there are many, also certain is the ambiguity in measurement. Plenty of ways to game the system and for the system to play favorites.
It's actually very common to fine manufacturers for negative externalities. We even tax some manufacturers for some negative externalities. For example, we have a federal tax on cigarettes that pay for some health programs.
I personally doubt that the American government has the power to be able to do such things. Regardless, the incoming administration will under no circumstances impose such restrictions, or push for them to be created. I seem to recall that the previous Trump administration removed restrictions around asbestos, to give you an idea.
Libertarians gonna libertarian. Even if it kills everyone.
I literally cannot walk or ride a bike where I live. I will get robbed and/or killed and the weather doesn't play nice. Distances to places I need to go are also quite lengthy. Ordering stuff online doesn't solve the problem, they also drive vehicles with tires. It is out of necessity that people in my part of the world are reliant on vehicles, and I assume most other people in other countries are too.
This is a very complex problem that is extremely difficult to solve and shouldn't just be dismissed as people just being married to their cars.
However, I'd love to see a less polluting compound used for vehicle tires, which is also cost effective for the end user. In my country the railroad system is totally buggered due to crime and corruption, so there are trucks everywhere. Reducing reliance on semi trucks for freight could possibly reduce the pollution a bit. In my country at least...
I'd love to see some of the tire wera data that Waymo has accumulated. Despite being heavier vehicles, I bet they do well on tire wear from no hard stops or starts, driving the speed limit, keeping properly inflated, and (I assume) optimizing driving to maintain momentum (e.g. not accelerating into red lights like I see so many human drivers do).
Have you experienced waymo in SF? It actually drives faster than regular folks and brakes much more harder because of that. The speed limit doesn’t apply to the streets of San Francisco and it typically accelerates to the limit as fast as possible (especially electric).
There’s so much waste with every household owning a car. A lot of this could be avoided with affordable mass transit options like high speed trains and subways instead.
tire dust is behind major die offs of juvinile salmon, thete are specific toxic compounds in it, and when therevare major rain events, all the dust in the ditches gets washed into rivers and streams in high enough concentrations to kill all the fish.
from memory the toxic compound is some sort of biocide put in tires, to keep them from bieng eaten by ? algea? fungus?
whatever, not an important detail, but an
additive that can be eliminated or replaced, $$$$$$$$
On previous thread of this topic, someone on hn claimed to have worked in tire industry and that some small additive that would cost few percent extra would largely address thos issue.
I found the following after a bit of searching. I'm sure there's more work being done.
https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/news/202...
Applied Quantum Materials Inc., in Edmonton, Alberta, is developing a specialized reinforcing additive for tires to minimize microplastic release over different road and temperature conditions.
Nova Graphene Canada Inc., in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, is developing a graphene-enhanced rubber that could reduce tire-wear shedding and extend the life of tires.
Stema Punch and Die Inc., in Cambridge, Ontario, is creating specialized compositions for tires to improve their wear and help stop the shed of microplastics.
And noise pollution! Even electric cars (which are quite heavy and produced a lot of tire wear) create loud roaring at moderate to high speeds for anyone the car is passing.
EVs are broadly comparable to the ICEV equivalent. We're talking 10-15% difference, sometimes less, and the gap closes a bit every year. Won't be long until EVs are consistently lighter than the gas equivalent.
sounds about right, I'm surprised it's so low; we should probably stop doing the other things putting microplastics into the environment since they account for 3/4.
tires are an essential part of most people's lives, and even city people who don't have cars rely heavily on wheeled vehicles. When I think about the plastics that I take out into the environment where I subject them to wear, I can't really think of anything apart from tires.
Most cars are more like a ton and a half to two tons, not eight.
But in any case, it's not clear that there is a lot of low hanging fruit in cutting down on private transit. Aside from a few outliers, most places with pretty great public transit still have a lot of private transit too. It has many use cases that public transit is unable to fill.
And have them run on a regular schedule, within and between cities. Imagine the benefit to the public and the environment. It could even be funded by tax payers.
We used to have that in the flatter parts of Ohio (which is ~most of it), with street cars, and interurban lines linking many of even the tiniest towns together, and with passenger rail between larger cities.
It was privately-funded. It worked.
...until the automobile became more common and people stopped started driving cars instead. (The literal-conspiracy between General Motors and Firestone Tire didn't help, either.)
At a certain point people will revolt at that suggestion. Most people I know are not going to give up their suburban/rural acres to live in a cramped, walkable city with no space to do everything they love.
There needs to be more choices. American suburbia is on another level I know, but there is no reason you can't have a bit more density, walk-able or bicycle friendly neighbourhoods, centred around amenities and public transport.
But some people will, and the easier we make alternative modes of transportation, the more people will choose them. Want to sit in traffic all day while an LRT zips by? Nobody is stopping you.
I occasionally feel bad for the folks on the LRT alongside I-84 on the days I commute to the office. The traffic is congested and very slow at times, and I still beat the train. And that's even before getting to downtown, where the train just crawls from station to station. I wish we could have a real subway.
I suspect the best option for most suburban cities to reduce traffic and air pollution is to strongly incentivize employers to allow remote work when feasible.
The lower limit in most jurisdictions in the US is 13 tons. And also, in most jurisdictions there is an exemption for vehicles used for personal recreation (e.g. you can absolutely drive a Volvo tractor to pull your enormous fifth wheel toy hauler with nothing more than a basic driver's license).
Genuinely curious if there are any real efforts to address this available to the consumer. In the kind of idiot who will buy more expensive tires because they shed less plastic, but as far as I’m aware I don’t actually have that opportunity.
I guess when the tyres wear down it all ends up as bits of microplastic so long life tyres would be better. There tends to be a bit of a trade off between long life and high grip though.
Doesn't address the tires directly, but smaller, lighter cars are available. Maybe greater awareness about pollution from tires would help that become more of a sales factor.
In the sense that they don't emit plastic particles, sure. But trains absolutely do create metal particle air pollution.
I think it would be an interesting comparison, given how often our local light rail trains operate nearly empty. If it has less than about 20 people per train car it is toting around more weight per passenger than a private vehicle with just the driver.
Stainless is mostly iron and chromium, sometimes nickel. Some oxidation states of chromium are indeed toxic, but the most stable form is chromium(III), which is harmless enough that you can buy it as a supplement. Nickel also occurs naturally in soil and many foods and is not accumulating in the body. The kidneys can remove it. Only large doses are problematic.
You would have to make some trade-offs with emissions/fuel economy though. Harder wearing compounds generally lead to higher rolling resistance, which means higher energy use per distance. I’m inclined to think that microplastics pollution might be worse than tailpipe emissions (or electricity generation pollution depending on your source)?, but it wouldn’t be straightforward. While there will probably always be uses for autos, we should encourage other methods of transport whenever possible.
Yes, we're at the stage now where democracies need to become far more dictatorial, otherwise their populations will continue mindlessly along the path of 'Tragedy of the Commons'.
The only thing that will do that is regulation, either mandating the types of cars we can buy, or taxing the kinds of cars we don't favor.
People in the majority prefer large, powerful cars, given the choice. And those cars already cost a lot, so any strategy of price increases to discourage them will have to be significant. This is why most people in Europe drive small, economical cars. Big cars are heavily taxed, and so is the fuel they use.
I really wish we could buy a Citroen Ami in the US, which is a small, light, and slow (28 mph top speed) electric car for city driving. Plus, it looks super cute!
I wouldn't mind them bringing in something like that - I'm in the UK where they don't have N-Boxes either but it would do the job and I mostly get around by e-bike these days so I prefer others to drive small light cars.
I hear this a lot and I am quite skeptical. Price-sensitive buyers do not buy new cars, they buy used ones. What is available on the used market is directly controlled by what the minority of people who buy new cars put their priorities on.
EVs are heavier but I suspect the wear is less than you might think because the braking is gentler with regenerative braking, so less wear on the tyres.
Also, there's quite a bit of pollution from break pads and discs, also reduced because of regenerative braking.
I couldn't find numbers though, with a brief bit of googling.
I’m not sure it’s gentler or in any way different from a tire’s perspective than braking. If I pull my foot off the one pedal driving, the deceleration I get is fairly comparable to about 3/4 braking in an ICE. (Off the top of my head estimate for illustration purposes only.)
But the tires are made of different materials and are different in other ways too. I can tell you first hand you spend far more on tires if you own an EV. Our model y spends more on tires than our giant diesel pickup, and far more than an ICE of similar size. As for the relative amount of microplastics they emit, I really couldn’t know.
You definitely wear your brake pads out far less with an EV. Just eyeing it though, volumetrically, brake pad wear has to be relatively insignificant compared to tire wear.
I’d guess EVs still emit substantially more tire particles, and fewer from brakes but nowhere close to compensating. But I’d not be shocked to death if someone studies it and you turn out to be right.
And on the plus side, those are probably issues materials science could solve (make the tires out of something benign) whereas EVs emit a lot less of other bad things that I’m sure are not easy to solve or they already would have been.
Your hypothesis then, roughly, is that braking causes more pollution when it's more extreme (since the total braking work being done is at least as great -- in practice much greater because of the increased mass), so smoother braking will reduce tire wear.
I'm inclined to believe an extreme version of that hypothesis -- I doubt 200k miles at 1mph would wear the tread substantially -- but in practice I don't think that's the case. Electric cars tend to replace tires around 10k miles sooner, so the net effect of everything involved (heavier cars, regenerative braking, rich young guys driving faster, mostly city driving, ...) is 15-50% more tire wear per mile.
Pretty sure most wear comes from the back tires (I should say the "power tires" to consider FWD vehicles). Many electric vehicles accelerate quite quickly, which just wears their tires even more.
Braking is braking. If you're stopping in N meters, regardless of how the braking force is applied (regenerative brake vs discs), the tire is the artifact taking the load.
Even then, most cars don't routinely brake as hard as they accelerate.
Motorcycles, with their high performance, are notorious for eating rear tires much faster than front tires, and they can't be rotated.
Then, there's my vehicle, full time 4WD (not AWD, there's a difference), it wears its tires quite evenly in contrast to 2WD/AWD vehicles.
Braking is usually much quicker than accelerating, for almost all vehicles (because brakes can absorb much more energy than engines can output). For this reason, I suspect most particulates are caused by breaking.
I believe you mean most drivers. All of this talk about EV tires wearing faster than ICE tires is driven by people accelerating aggressively simply because they now can.
Electric cars are mostly drive-by-wire, so if the same driver input results in accelerating faster in an EV then I'd say that's the car's responsibility.
That makes no sense. Every car on the road, regardless of power source, has what amounts to an infinitely adjustable pedal controlling acceleration. The relationship between pedal input and actual acceleration varies between cars, and can vary even on the same car in different drive modes. How fast you accelerate is 100% under your own control.
If you put effort into controlling it, sure. Most people have other priorities, they push the pedal when they want to go and they leave it to the car to accelerate at a reasonable speed when they do. Mass-market cars should be built for the population that exists, and that means having a default accelerator-response that does sensible things for the way that normal people normally use the accelerator.
> Most people ... push the pedal when they want to go and they leave it to the car to accelerate at a reasonable speed when they do.
I'm going to need a source for that. There are literally tens of thousands of accelerator pedal types, with different hinges, different travel, different stiffness and different engines with different ECUs and different drive modes attached to them. There's no one default way to step on the gas that people would just pull out of muscle memory.
I have nothing to back this up other than I'd like to see a comparison between EV's and other luxo models for tire wear. Because the tire design matters a lot when it comes to wear. I'm a bit suspicious about the weight being the primary driver since I have a van that weighs 6000lbs and it doesn't burn through tires.
I can see two things. One maybe EV tires are spec'd to be more sporty. Or possible tires aren't optimized for the extra weight.
Pointed comment: No one but no one cares about higher weight trucks and suv's at all when it comes to tire wear. Only EV's get singled out.
Typical EVs are about 10-15% heavier than the comparable ICE. Yes it makes a difference, but only marginally. Normal drivers without a lead foot get 10s of thousands of miles from tires, just like ICE vehicles.
Also, few EVs that are not pickups have 100 kWh batteries; more typically 60-75.
I'd say it's slightly worse, mainly because when you first get the car you tend to launch it a few times and take advantage of all the power. My first set of tires only lasted 27k miles.
After a year you drive normally, I get about 35k miles out of 40k mile rated tires, similar to my old Audi.
My wife doesn't buy that argument. To her, when I have regen braking on, we slow down a lot more than we would otherwise with the brakes. It could just be the way I'm driving though.
Cool, let’s make tyres that degrade when in small chunks with high surface area. It’ll cost a bit more to replace them every few years (since they’ll also degrade a bit more whilst on the car) but will be a far better solution than the kneejerk “lol ban all the cars” stuff.
I remember asking adults about this when I was probably seven years old. Once I learned that tires wore down, eventually smooth, it made sense to me that the material had to go somewhere. No one really had much of a good answer as to where it all went.
Like many efforts (effective or otherwise) to solve environmental problems, fixing this might require new tyres sold to environmentally conscious consumers initially, to prove that it can be done. Cost effectiveness comes later, paired with government regulations.
I'm assuming there are currently no tyres on the market that contain nothing that degrades into microplastics, but please correct me if I'm wrong.
Streetcars, subways and LRTs do not require new fancy tire compounds to stop releasing microplastics. Their brake pads can, though, although I imagine that regenerative braking helps somewhat.
Bicycles are so lightweight that the amount they release is negligible compared to a car.
Agreed, and I like all those forms of transport, and use some of them when I can. But I do have to drive sometimes (for a certain definition of 'have to' of course).
We're not going to win these things by saying "just don't drive". Driving less is part of the solution, but it's not going to work by itself.
Yet, it is still not literally a plastic by definition. I feel the term “plastic” is already demonized enough, and now it often serves as a generic umbrella term for alarmist purposes.
Quick, let's make something more expensive! Everything is killing people and everything needs taxing more, naturally.
It's OK because I myself can afford it and we can just tell poor people to use the public transport that doesn't exist.
The public transport that does exist is also expensive and/or unreliable because ideology in government is that cars are better. But that's also ok, I think, anyway doesn't affect me
---
Sarcasm aside people really need to stop this reflexive "scientists say X is bad" -> more taxes and higher prices reaction.
I guess we can ignore all these problems and keep making the environment worse, as an alternative strategy. I don't have any kids, but I hope yours are going to be ok.
Tax tires, move worn tires to a recycling plant, bill a recycling tax when the owner buys a new tire...
... and then set fire to the tires, keep the money for recycling safe in your pocket, and then keep lying about how good is that we "recycle" things.
"In Spain, a recycling plant burns every four days, a figure that has increased since 2018. In 2023, the record was broken with 109 recycling plants that were [deliberately] set on fire" [1]
"In 2019, a tire recycling plant in Seseña burned for days. This fire produced pollution greater than that generated by the city of Madrid for a whole year" [1]
Or grind it and put the stuff in each children park, as currently.
It's not exactly the point of this story, but I found a way to reduce the number of waste tires I generate.
Tires with 6/32" to 8/32" of tread are a scam. They get flats, and wear down to the legal minimum (in Texas) of 3/32" very quickly.
I buy tires with 19/32" of tread. No nail has yet managed to go through 19/32" of tread (or that much air gap) plus through the equivalent of a 10-ply design to puncture my tire, at least not until I wear them down to 6/33".
If we wanted puncture-proof, run-flat, handle-like-touring-tires, last-forever tites, we could have them. They are out there.
I confess confusion, here, as the article links in this as support of the tire claim. Which is in contradiction to what it says. Specifically, the article links it as support of a 28% claim, when the link is challenging that number.
This looks like a good time to remind that forcing people back in the office means forcing a ton of people to use cars, most likely with a single passenger (the driver) through long commute. They'll emit a bunch of CO2 and pollution in the environment and they'll shed a ton of micro-plastics in the environment through car tires.
And don't even bother commenting about electric cars or whatever: electric cars are a minority of the vehicles in circulations, there are a ton of SUVs and the majority of people live far from their workplace and will have to use cars anyway. People living in cities at walking distance from their workplace or served by functioning/efficient/effective public transport are a small lucky minority.
We should really push for public transport (ON RAILS!) and for more work-from-home arrangements.
It's disappointing they don't list any sort of detailed solutions or future tech. All they do is promote taxation and mention that tire innovation can help.
Thats stress on the road, as in things like the road surface, not tire wear. The physics about what's happening to the tire surface are pretty different from what's happening to the road.
Asphalt is a petroleum product, so it's not irrelevant. But even so you're missing some physics in your comment.
Considering that friction is symmetric, road wear implies tire wear and vice versa, at roughly the same order of magnitude of severity, relative to respective hardnesses. Tires are generally softer than road surfaces, so they wear faster than roads.
Uhh, what? Not all roads are asphalt, tons aren't. But even then that's irrelevant. If I made the tire out of Vaseline would it have the same wear characteristics? After all it's also made of petroleum.
Road wear isn't just about the friction. A lot of it is the stresses of the road surface being squished into the ground and deformed. If you've ever seen a boat planing over the water, the road surface kind of wants to make a similar pattern but due to rigidity it can't quite do that. So the internal stresses of the system of the road surface are pretty radically different than the layers of a tire being stretched and pressed into an air bubble.
Assigning blame is less interesting to me than whether there are potential avenues for an alternative that both serves as tires and avoids this micro plastics issue.
A friend and I were talking about the weight of EVs and we assumed my EV would be heavier than his car, a BMW 3. The BMW was heavier. Maybe the average EV is heaver than the average ICE, but if you compare what the EV has replaced for that owner, it might be that the EVs aren't noticeably heavier. I just checked the car I had before the Leaf - a Subaru Outback. It was also heavier.
I don't think that taxing vehicles based on weight is the right option though. If the pollution is from tires, then tax tires. Do this based on the compounds present in that tire. If someone drives rashly, doing donuts all over the place, then they as a greater polluter will need to pay more. I don't really know anything about Formula 1, but get them to do the race on a single set of tires. Not for pollution, but for solutions that might make it into regular tires.
Denmark used to tax cars based on weight as it was considered that weight was equal to wear and tear on the roads. Although that logic should probably have been weight * distance driven.
Now there’s a fun tax to implement!
https://da.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A6gtafgift (Sorry in danish only)
Weight * distance is actually literally fun for governments to implement.
Why?
Because it gives them more taxes, bigger government and as a bonus more spying on citizens.
The Dutch government has been talking about this type of tax for decades. The idea is to put a mandatory live-tracking device in every car that sends data to the government about where you are at all times.
Currently the tax is based on weight and type of energy source of the car and some of the highest taxes on fuel in the world. This boils down to the same as the weight * distance tax. But why keep it simple if you could complicate it further AND get free live spying as a bonus?
In UK my yearly MOT records how far my car has driven.
Taxing distance doesn't need to track _where_ the car has been, just how far it's gone.
I seem to recall when selling cars the V5 transfer also has a mileage (so easy to attribute)
It isn't precisely easy (MOT and tax timings won't line up etc) and arrears rather than advance etc. We definitely have enough data to do a fair approximation - just high operational overheads to collect
That depends. Do you also tax when the car is driven outside the country?
It's legitimate to track entry and exit on national borders though. A tax exception based on entry/exit times is doable and better than constant geo tracking.
> The Dutch government has been talking about this type of tax for decades. The idea is to put a mandatory live-tracking device in every car that sends data to the government about where you are at all times.
God damn.
I would have gone with "mandatory service where the odometer is sent to the government, and government keeps track of when last service was done and fines owners who are late"
Why would you not just use the odometer reading?
Cars get sold, eventually. You put the odometer reading on the paperwork to transfer the car. Check that against tax records. Purchaser has incentive to check that the recorded mileage is correct, otherwise they’ll have to pay the tax. The odometer is already tamper-resistant. Not perfectly so, and there is fraud, but there is always tax fraud.
> there is fraud, but there is always tax fraud.
It's also a type of fraud which is fairly easy to detect. If a car is recorded as driving just 2000 miles per year, yet freeway cameras detected it driving 100 miles every weekday all year, open a fraud case.
> The Dutch government has been talking about this type of tax for decades. The idea is to put a mandatory live-tracking device in every car that sends data to the government about where you are at all times.
Why would they need a tracking device for this? If Google is to be believed the Dutch government requires periodic vehicle inspections. Couldn't they just go by the odometer difference between inspections to get the mileage?
They want the live tracking service because they want to change the price per mile driven based on congestion on the road. So your trip from Maastricht to Eindhoven will be a lot cheaper at 2am than it will be at 8am.
Why not just tax the fuel?
The Netherlands already has one of the highest fuel taxes in the world. There's pushback from fuel station owners near the borders because many people fill up their cars abroad.
Isn't weight * distance proportional to gas consumption?
Sure, you'll under-tax the more efficient cars but I don't necessarily see this as a problem.
Not for EV's. Which is why my state has been researching the move from a fuel tax to one based on mileage.
My current favourite pet policy (UK) is to introduce a zero rate tax band on energy, to help those least well off, and have a higher band beyond some average consumption.
You encourage people to use less, and also tax things such as EVs that use more electricity.
Of course it doesn't quite capture everything discussed though.
I think just taxing the tires is the solution! More wear on roads should closely correlate with more wear on tires, and each tire likely has a lifetime determined by weight * distance. You need to account for tire structure, but even if you tax all tires the same, it should be a good approximation of what we're looking for.
This is a good way to incentivise people to buy the shittiest tyres they can and stretch them well past usable life because it’ll cost them a motza to replace.
Is there a way to tax tires (tyres?) based on wear and not when they have holes in?
One potential way to do this would be to weigh the tires at sale and charge a tax based on the weight of the tire. When the tire is ultimately disposed of, a refund is issued based on the weight of the disposed tire.
This would encourage both avoiding tire wear and proper disposal of tires. That assumes obviously that people don't cheat the system by making tires heavier somehow when returning them.
It's actually a fourth power law, not a linear relationship. So trucks are polynomially more damaging. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
I wonder if that applies to the amount of material the tyres shed as well.
Well they have more tires than four vehicles do.
The Tesla Model 3 Long Range weighs 1823 kg.
The BMW M340i xDrive weighs about 1818 kg.
Seeing as these two cars are similar in size, capacity, and performance (0-60 mph in 4.2 s), it is nice to see that the electric option weighs about the same as an ICE car of similar specs.
The Leaf, of course, is a very budget car that can hardly be compared to the BMW 3 series.
While EVs are just as bad as ICE cars on the tyre microplastics front, they are at least slightly better in terms of brake dust thanks to regenerative braking.
I expect they are also slightly worse thanks to the immediate acceleration. Even if 0-60 is similar to a particular ICE car, 0-5 or 0-10 is not.
By the way, there are EV tyres - does anyone know why? Is it just marketing or do they have some special properties?
I think the difference isn't so much between car models, it's the drivers behaviour that wears down the tyres. Something happens to drivers of cars that has the power to accellerate fast from 0. Electric wears down the tires faster because of how the average driver uses the pedals.
> By the way, there are EV tyres - does anyone know why? Is it just marketing or do they have some special properties?
They have lower rolling resistance, in attempt to extract a bit larger range.
Often they have sound damping foam, and try to be more efficient.
Just to be pedantic, the fuel has some weight too. I think your average cars have a 50 to 80l tank, which is an extra ~40-60kg when full.
> If the pollution is from tires, then tax tires.
Why not but …
> Do this based on the compounds present in that tire.
I’m not certain we’d want to create incentive for less polluting compounds over security.
Also, tires are generally expensive and people are already driving with worn out tires regularly for this reason.
So why not, in absolute, I agree, but it may create issues.
> I’m not certain we’d want to create incentive for less polluting compounds over security.
Sure we do, if that pollution causes a greater risk. Those two security costs seam hard to compare though.
Usually you calculate with 20% more weight from EV. Significant, but not as much as the general trend to build housewife tanks.
> before the Leaf - a Subaru Outback. It was also heavier.
A bigger car with more cargo capacity was heavier? Is that a surprise? How _much_ heavier was the Outback? Only 100 lbs or so? That's the surprise.
The Outback is also bigger and has more cargo capacity than the BMW 3 but likewise only weighs 100 pounds more.
The weight of electric cars is more proportional to their range than their size, and they also shed the ICE powertrain and exhaust/emissions systems, so the breakeven range where they weigh the same as an equivalent ICE car is a range of something like 200-300 miles. Which is why the BMW 3 and Tesla 3 have a similar weight.
The difference is that as new battery chemistries improve energy density, the weight of the electric car can go down. Whereas ICE powertrains are extremely mature with not a lot of low-hanging fruit, so significant improvements in power to weight ratio are less likely to be forthcoming.
> proportional to their range than their size
Well and total vehicle weight impacts EV range far more than it does ICE range. So the leaf is both small and with shorter range but the gain is a smaller battery pack.
> as new battery chemistries improve energy density
You can have improved density today. You're just not going to like the charge and discharge characteristics very much. EVs have lots of multi variable problems due to their efficiency and utilization aims. To be fair it just is a harder problem to solve but the years of development and lack of clear gains are still showing obvious bottlenecks.
> so significant improvements in power to weight ratio are less likely to be forthcoming.
You can have vastly improved PWR now. Just ride a motorcycle. I think Power train Weight to Total Vehicle Weight is what you really want to think about. In either EV or ICE case there are still plenty of gains to be had here.
Not really relevant to your overall point, but I found it interesting that apparently F1 already tried that:
In 2005, tyre changes were disallowed in Formula One, therefore the compounds were harder as the tyres had to last the full race distance of around 300 km (200 miles). Tyre changes were re-instated in 2006, following the dramatic and highly political 2005 United States Grand Prix, which saw Michelin tyres fail on two separate cars at the same turn, resulting in all Michelin runners pulling out of the Grand Prix, leaving just the three teams using Bridgestone tyres to race.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_One_tyres#History
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_United_States_Grand_Prix
Tire changes were disallowed in 2005 to break Ferrari's dominance who's strategy relied on super soft sticky tires being charged often.
Why couldn’t the other teams change tires as often?
Ferrari had an exclusive deal with Bridgestone that the other top teams didn't: https://au.motorsport.com/f1/news/the-bridgestone-and-ferrar... # The Bridgestone tire was superior to the Michelin.
They all could, but Ferrari built their car + strategy + drivers' style for multiple fast laps with multiple pit stops as the winning formula. Having just multiple tire changes without the same car, strategy and driver won't have the same results
Your first sentence implies there is some relevance of taking an arbitrary EV and comparing it to an arbitrary ICE. There's not... I am gonna bet anything your random EV is gonna be heavier than a Suzuki Swift.
No-one actually wants to do this but the answer is to tax fuel. UK road tax for example already taxes bigger/heavier cars more (albeit not particularly granularly), so there’s your weight component. Fuel consumption is a decent proxy for distance.
Obviously there’s some maths needed on how to apply the tax to both ICE and EVs, and to think about edge cases (super efficient but hard on tyres), although my gut says that likely the harder you are on tyres, the harder you’ll be on fuel.
> If the pollution is from tires, then tax tires.
I don't think you can tax tires high enough that it will make a difference, but the same is also true if we attempt to tax by weight. Any tax is going to be the equivalent of slapping €10 on a plane ticket. It's not enough to stop the behaviour, but might be enough to keep some people driving on dangerously worn down tires.
It also doesn't matter if the car is an EV or ICE, the behaviour we want to limit is driving. The idea of taxing the tires could of cause lead to development of tires that doesn't shed microplastic.
“ the behaviour we want to limit is driving”
By we, what do you mean? If this was true, we’d build walkable cities, public transportation and promote home office as much as possible.
"We" as in a society that wants to reduce the amount of microplastics from tires (or who wants to reduce environmental impact as much as possible).
It's sadly also the same "we" that is more interested in preserving the status quo in the name of the al might holy economy as it exists today. The same "we" that doesn't want to upset voters. The same "we" who won't vote for the greener option because "we" can't imagine a future different from yesterday.
It seems a number of factors contribute to this beyond weight: how you drive (braking and accelerating aggressively), what conditions you drive in, the state of your tires, etc.
Weight seems to be one easy to understand and affecting factor. Why not start there?
Because the thing you're worried about is microplastics, which are directly proportional to tire wear regardless of whether the wear is from heavier vehicles or more miles driven or idiots doing donuts, so if you just tax the externality directly you don't have to worry about which thing is causing it.
Ideally, sure. But it will result in people stretching their tires more and more, and thus more accidents.
We already tax 'distance' by putting tax on the petrol.
Damage to the roads increases with the fourth power of axle weight. It follows that all passenger cars heavy or not, EV or ICE are insignificant for road-damage.
One could surmise that there is a similar relation with tire wear and therefore pollution from them as well.
But taxing tires is I think a good idea as it is a consumable and the wear and it's impact can be directly measured.
The problem I see with taxing tires is twofold:
- how is taxing going to solve this problem, it's unlikely that it is going to have a significant impact on driving
- can taxes be fed into tire research in a way that reduces the impact on the environment? Are there any solutions that need funding?
Doing a Formula 1 tace on a single set of tires would change the strategy in auto racing. I strongly disapprove.
This reminded me of an old article I read about this from `Straight Dope` years ago (2006 in fact!)[0].
> Pollution studies in the Los Angeles basin in the 1980s concluded that more than five tons of breathable tire dust were released into the atmosphere there each day, and there’s no reason to think that figure’s gone down since.
[0] https://www.straightdope.com/21343778/when-the-rubber-meets-...
What's the dust that coats everything stored in a parking garage? Is that tire dust or something else?
Tire and brake dust, sand, little bit of grease, some soot settling out of the smog, maybe some salt (if you're by the sea)
Or in an area that salts the roads in winter.
I used to have an apartment abutting a parking garage and also above a busy three lane road.. the worst black dust and grime everywhere. Pretty sure moving out of that apartment probably added years back to my life.
Five tons sounds like a lot. But on the other hand, the Los Angeles basin sounds pretty big. (a quick check suggests it is about 1200 square miles)
The AQI there looks good.
Don't assume that the distribution is uniform.
I'm only making the assumptions that I can given what little information is contained in the original statement. We would need better quality information to make any further inferences.
Aqi doesn't measure this, does it?
Is tire particulate too big to show up in the AQI measurement? If so, does it fall out of the air so fast that it isn't really a problem?
We need to start making manufacturers pay for their negative externalities.
Manufacturers aren’t making tires and then turning them into microplastics alone. Pretending consumers aren’t part of the problem is misleading.
We could add fees to tire manufacturers, but be honest: It will just get added to the price of the tire. That’s fine if the goal is economic incentives or funding remediation, but people start to lose interest in such fines as soon as they realize it comes out of their own pockets instead of from some imagined slush fund manufacturers are keeping to themselves. (See similar problems with conversations about tariffs, which people only like until they realize they will be paying for them.)
Manufacturers don’t make tires expecting them to not be driven on, so that’s besides the point, but regardless.
The goal should be to tax manufacturers so that there’s a strong incentive/an opportunity for market competition to produce tires that don’t shed microplastics.
Its just one disincentive. Tax driving overall to push people to more efficient (from a tire plastic/energy usage) standpoint.
Use those taxes to fund public transportation.
America generally isn’t laid out that well for public transit. You could build it and have it for free, in many places no one would ride it.
plenty of places in America could have far better public transportation than they do. Take the Bay Area vs Switzerland
Size: Switzerland 15,940 mi², Bay Area 6,966 mi²
Population: Switzerland 8.85 million, Bay Area 7.76 million
So given that, the bay area is twice as dense as Switzerland
Miles of train tracks: Switzerland 3,241 miles, Bay Area ~300 miles?
SF Bay Area has a bay, Switzerland is all mountains so it's not like Switzerland is particularly easier to cover in public transportation
Plenty of other places in the USA could be covered in trains. LA for example used to have the largest public transit system in the world. It was all torn down between ~1929 and ~1975. A few lines have been created since but, the problem in the USA is, except for maybe NYC and Chicago, public transportation is seen as a handout to poor people instead of the transit the masses use like most saner places. (Most cities in Europe and Asia). Getting it back to that point seems nearly impossible. Building one track at a time, each taking 10-20 years with Nimbys fighting them all the way means the density of tracks always is too small to be useful, and so no usage.
is there a statistic that can show us the density distribution? my intuition says that the bay area would have a pretty gradual slope (people living mostly everywhere of mostly low density), whereas Switzerland would have lots of areas mostly uninhabited while having a few high concentration cities.
looking at the two respective largest cities: Zurich is about twice as densely populated as San Jose.
this has a huge impact on public transit viability.
True, America bulldozed their cities to build parking lots and roads, which made them much worse for anything but driving.
Public transit only works if people don’t have an option for private travel in a luxurious car.
You never went to western Europe or rich Asian countries ? You should try it and see for yourself.
I have, and everywhere people use public transit, it’s far more expensive or tedious to use a nice, big car. The houses, driveway, garage, and parking situation are inferior to those of 90% of the US, where you can easily take a Ford F150 or full size SUV almost anywhere you want.
Cars need space. Walking and bicycling (and public transit) need density. The environment for optimizing for each of those is completely opposite.
And once a person has invested in a car (the car itself and a home with enough space to store the car), and they use that car on a daily basis to commute to work or drop the kids off at school, they will be very unlikely to support taxes to pay for public transit, something they will almost never use, since they are already leaving the house in a car, they are going to do all their errands while out in a car.
Different population (and business) density for most of America which is entirely suburban except for the dangerous downtown areas.
There is evidence all around the world that this is not true.
Making driving way more expensive takes care of that.
Weirdly the Dutch take the train plenty and also have lots of cars
And also have the best bike infrastructure in the world. I wonder how the average car miles driven per year compares between the Netherlands and, say, the US.
Consumers are not part of the problem. There is literally no action a consumer can take to ameliorate this situation because there are no tires produced that don't have this problem, and many consumers need to have a car to live.
Sure there is. Drive less, walk and take public transportation more. People can change their behavior if they are incentivized to do so.
And as others are pointing out, buy and drive smaller cars.
Manufacture in country A and sell in country B. Or vice versa.
But never manufacture and sell in the same country, or the government might try to get you to pay for your negative externalities!
And now, there’s this annoying predicament where as you introduce more laws and more enforcement, you only cripple your own economy and rarely cause any significant improvement along the lines of what you hope. Look at Australia — we have all these appliance safety laws, but all of the appliances are made overseas and there’s no good point for the government to inspect and enforce compliance with those laws. I just bought a generic vacuum sealer from an online shop the other day. It was cheaper than buying at a brick & mortar store, even with delivery, and it definitely does not comply with Australia safety standards.
We’ve killed our local industry, and our economy is suffering for it. I don’t think the answer is to remove the safety/etc laws, but instead to tax all imports enormously. Be aggressive and unfair so that local industry is immediately viable. It’ll be painful, but it’s what most countries need. Comparative advantage turned out to be a terrible basis for international trade.
This is what tariffs do well. When you tax a local manufacturer, you impose an equal tariff on imports.
That only makes it fair within your country, but it doesn't remove the self-crippling effects.
They're not self-crippling, that's the whole point of internalizing negative externalities.
That is why international agreements like the Montreal Protocol are so important.
That was 40 years ago. In the interim capitalism has won and democracy is failing. Agreements like Montreal will never happen again, at least not in our lifetimes.
Look no further than the failure of the Paris Agreement and the ascent of authoritarianism worldwide. No one cares about environmental agreements, certainly not those in the rarified airs of billionaires, oligarchs, and other captains 9f industry.
> Agreements like Montreal will never happen again
They happen all the time. Just look at how the European Union operates on a day-to-day basis.
This and the Montreal Protocol wasn't achieved with a self-defeating attitude, though.
> This and the Montreal Protocol wasn't achieved with a self-defeating attitude, though.
What's clear is that the attitudes of those of us in favour of such measures has only achieved the opposite is the last decade, as the user you're replying to has rightfully pointed out. Optimism has gotten us nowhere.
...and then the price is added to the price of tyres. Like, where do you think the money is going to go? People can't easily substitute their car use, and there's nothing out there replacing rubber that's road legal, so all you're doing is just adding a tax to car use.
You could do this just as easily with gas taxes, registration fees or any other system.
> People can't easily substitute their car use... so all you're doing is just adding a tax to car use.
So long as you don't have to pay the actual costs associated with your car use, why would you _want_ to find an alternative?
> You could do this just as easily with gas taxes, registration fees or any other system.
Registration fees tax ownership of a car, not use. IMO that's... not great; if you want to own a car you rarely drive, why should you pay for everyone else's pollution?
Gas taxes could be a fair way to target CO2 emissions, but (given heavy EVs don't pay them) are a poor way to target tyre particulate pollution.
As a response to particulate pollution specifically, a tyre tax is quite closely targeted (although possibly ill-advised for other reasons, as I mentioned in my comment).
Well the political party going into power believes they have a mandate to go back in time to when things were great.
Right now that means protective tariffs are a fashionable “something” to do.
Is taxing car use bad?
Ask your poorer constituents.
I work from home and get paid an enormous salary. I literally do not care. But (1) in turn I make decisions which are purely convenience based because of that disposable income and (2) I'm just one vote.
The message you'll be selling to everyone else is: "hey, that multi-thousand dollar vehicle you use for getting to work because there's no public transport and your job requires you on-site? Pay more money to have it."
Or did the US not just have an entire election apparently determined by the price of eggs and the cost of living?
As has been mentioned dozens of times in these comments, do it by car weight. Then poorer constituents do have a choice.
I can’t really afford a car and take the train to work. It is paid for in part by high taxes on personal vehicles.
Then other countries will retaliate with tariffs on the goods you export. Ultimately we are all left worse off.
> Ultimately we are all left worse off.
This is simply not true. Protectionism can have massive benefits. China making it impossible for foreign companies to gain serious ground there independently has been incredibly beneficial, else they wouldn't have done it. I happen to live in Korea which is similar in ways, and here too it's an enormously good thing for the country and its citizens.
The dream that protectionism is bad by definition is truly one of the biggest deceptions in economy of the post-Reagan era.
It's a great thing because it's basically funneling money from global megacorps to local corporations - which might still be huge, but nothing compared to e.g. Coca Cola or Google. This is a positive thing for everyone except for those companies' shareholders, and in a way the US as that's where almost all these megacorps are based.
This is really an important thing to realize, and I can't stress this enough. It's exactly like the EU imposing lots of regulations on Apple et. al. Apple isn't just going to take their bags and not sell there, nor have they raised prices to EU customers as a result of these rules. They simply comply.
Imagine if, say, Germany ruled that to sell Coke in Germany as an international company, you have to set up a 50-50 owned JV with an existing German company unrelated to Coke. You think Coke is neither going to give up on Germany nor are they going to raise their prices. They're simply going to be making less of a profit in Germany. Great for everyone. It has played out this way in every country with such rules in place.
Also we need incentives to convince people to choose to drive lighter and smaller cars. Carrots and/or sticks should be considered.
Alternatively, new tire technologies could maybe also solve the problem.
We need alternatives to cars too.
If it's not already obvious, in a lot of places, when regulations are promoted to reduce waste and benefit public/environmental health, a large number of people will get angry and vote for those who'll want to maximize damage just because. If regulations promoting smaller cars were ever suggested in these places, some smiling politician would announce a mandate that vehicles be 5 tons or greater with anything smaller being banned, and compilations of people who worried about the environment would be circulated and heavily mocked online.
This is misunderstanding why people respond that way.
There are a lot of people who can't easily change their behavior, e.g. because your theory is that they should buy smaller cars but their business requires a vehicle that can carry heavy loads once a week and they can't afford to buy a separate vehicle for that so the larger vehicle has to be their daily driver. Then a tax meant to induce a change in behavior is received by them as an unavoidable tax hike, which they naturally resent and oppose, and because of the nature of politics they'll then propose the opposite of whatever you're trying to do to them.
What you really need to do is to make it more possible for them to do the thing you want. For example, right now if you want to have a modern compact car for most use and an old truck you use once a week for truck stuff, you have to register and insure two vehicles. That isn't currently economical, but it's what you want to happen so they're not just driving the truck at all times.
What you want to do is to make it economical. Only charge a registration fee for someone's primary vehicle and waive the cost for a second one, and make insurance work in such a way that having two vehicles doesn't have any higher liability premiums than driving the same total number of miles in one vehicle.
Then they can do what you want, and in fact have the incentive to, because the smaller car will save them gas most of the time but they still have the truck when they need it.
Incentives and penalties need to also exist to encourage manufacturers to offer smaller cars. Many domestic manufacturers are finding that giant luxury SUVs and 100+ kW high-end BEVs are highly profitable, and aren't even selling small and light vehicles at all for customers to choose.
Tyre wear is proportional to the fourth power of wheel load; reducing weight per wheel is the key here.
Hiwever, taxing new tyres may be counterproductive, since encouraging folk to keep using their worn tyres is not a good outcome for road safety.
Tyre wear is proportional to the fourth power of wheel load; reducing weight per wheel is the key here.
No, it's not.
You're taking a very loose rule of thumb for road surface wear and baselessly applying it to tires.
Tire wear follows the rubber the tire is made out of. Soft rubber wears faster. Once you control for that it's acceleration and braking loads (i.e. driving style) that dominate. After that is when weight starts mattering.
If what you said was even remotely true then heavy vehicles would get obviously less life out of tires compared to compact cars when in reality they get about the same
> If what you said was even remotely true then heavy vehicles would get obviously less life out of tires compared to compact cars when in reality they get about the same
Are you assuming that the tires of heavy vehicles have the same thickness as lighter vehicles? My bike has much thinner tires than any car, and they can last ten thousand kilometers.
I'm not sure where you're getting these ideas from. Best estimate I can see of prime mover tyre lifespan is 40,000-120,000 km.
I'd be quite happy if I could get that kind of lifespan out of my cars tyres.
Tires these days are expensive. To make them cheaper, they have reduced quality as well. Likely wearing faster and with worse material
We need to start making consumers pay for their negative externalities.
Until the externality cost is not baked into product cost it won’t be paid for.
You can tax producers, who will then increase prices. Or you can apply a tax to the product directly, and make it appear that the consumer is paying. But who is actually paying it is a question of tax incidence and a function of demand and supply elasticities.[1]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence
Making manufacturers pay is equivalent to making consumers pay.
The price is passed on to the consumer. The idea of “making manufacturers pay” in commoditized markets like tires is a feel-good myth. Any additional fees will go to the consumer price.
Consumers are ultimately the party responsible for this pollution though, so we should pay.
Paying taxes doesn’t reduce the harm. You can’t change a complex system with one knob.
Raising the cost incentivizes finding alternatives. Your statement would only be true if no alternatives are ever available.
Customers have a price ceiling though.
consumers are already paying heftily… in virginia we pay 4.56% on the value of the vehicle every year plus there is an electic vehicle tax and also million other taxes and fees added.
funny that state with “don’t thread on me” license plate is a bastion of socialism where you are not allowed to own a car but have to pay each year to the state for the right to own the car… the problem of course is all that insane amount of money collected will never be used for anything other than to pay for pensions for former government employees :)
Don't know about your state in particular, but most places in the US vehicle and fuel taxes are not enough to pay for road maintenance, and it is being subsidized out of other taxes.
My state realized a couple of decades ago that they were going to have the same kind of problem with their pension system and recreated it to be self-funding. They still have the old pensions to cover but at least they aren't continuing to dig themselves a deeper hole.
The original commenter stated:
"We need to start making consumers pay for their negative externalities."
Alls I was trying to say is that consumers are already paying crazy money. 26 states have property taxes on cars! In VA even with all that PLUS a special tax for EVs PLUS most of the roads around the DC metro area are tollroads it is still not enough :)
I was being facetious talking about pension funds - what I was basically trying to say that whatever money is collected isn't going to where it should be going - if there is a budget shortfall (and wouldn't you know - there always is...) money gets appropriated to other things...
Yeah my first paragraph was the important one. Building and maintaining roads is really expensive.
the majority of the pollution probably comes from semi trucks rather than passenger cars, due to the huge weight and number of wheels
Where i live, 80% of all vehicles are passenger vehicles. I'm not sure that the extra wheels on semis would make up for that difference, especially with the slow increase in size of passenger vehicles.
Something like 98% of ware from road vehicles is caused by semi’s vs 2% from cars and trucks.
20% * 18 = 3.6 vs 80% * 4 = 3.2, so barring some 3rd category semi’s would have more tires. They also have a lot more weight on each of those tires.
Road wear is proportional to weight.
Semi tires are hard, long-lasting compounds relative to soft consumer tires with deep treads and soft rubber.
> Road wear is proportional to weight
No, it scales at the fourth power of the axle weight.
Hard long lasting compounds don’t actually make up for fully loaded semi’s weight. They are much larger tires and with consistent heavy loads may only last 25k miles (or 100k with light loads).
So more and much larger tires and fairly similar lifespan = they liked make up a significant majority of tire pollution.
Agree, the damage to the road (and the tyres, presumably) is proportional to weight^4.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
> The fourth power law (also known as the fourth power rule) states that the stress on the road caused by a motor vehicle increases in proportion to the fourth power of its axle load
I hate that the 4th power law is called a law. It's not a law of nature, it's a lazy curve fit.
Think about this...if car does 'x' damage to the road, 2 cars does 2x damage. 2 cars welded together side by side (axle to axle so the axle count stays the same) would also do 2x damage, but the 4th power law says it does 16x damage.
If it's wrong by a factor of 8 in the simplest thought experiment it's not a law. You can obviously make a heavy load act like many small ones, or concentrate a light load so it does a lot of damage.
Constant * X^4 just coincidentally went through the data in a single 1950s dataset...and for some reason we're calling it a law 70 years later, when it's really just a loose trend that we could easily break with a little engineering. And we probably have broken it...tires, roads, and vehicles have changed a fair bit in 7 decades.
If you're welding the two cars together connecting the axles you're still having 8 contact patches instead of 4, so the axle load is the same as 2 separate vehicles they're just moving in tandem.
You'd need to stack the two cars on top of each other to increase the axle load. In which case I'd say it's not obvious how much more the road wear would be without looking at data.
I'm not saying the 4th power law is absolute truth, I truly don't know what the wear patterns would look like on a modern surface. But your example isn't proving it wrong at all.
> Think about this...if car does 'x' damage to the road, 2 cars does 2x damage. 2 cars welded together side by side (axle to axle so the axle count stays the same) would also do 2x damage, but the 4th power law says it does 16x damage.
Are you removing the two inner wheels from the axle? Those would also support weight
A little off topic, but what are the roads releasing into the environment as they wear down? Asphalt is often somewhat radioactive since it's made from oil? Is there benzene in there? What is the scale of asphalt nanoparticles compared to tire nanoparticles?
there are 200000x the number of private cars. are you sure?
A fully loaded tractor trailer has 5 axles and weighs 80,000 lbs, it does 9000-10000x more damage than a passenger car.
This is why states operate weigh stations — overweight trucks cause significant damage.
it's widely accepted that trucks cause the majority of road wear, considering the tire is the softer part in contact there, it seems pretty plausible
I don't have a citation to point to, though!
edit: there are roughly 100x registered passenger cars in the US as semis
Well, given a semi only averages 8x the miles of a car per year, your initial claim is wrong.
https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10309
Hi SideQuark. I'm writing you here as there's no contact email on your profile--I wanted to ask you if you ever tried a SAT solver on RomuTrio to find cycles (or you can give me some hints). I'm referring to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22457101.
You can write me at sebastiano.vigna@gmail.com. Thanks for any info!
BTW, thanks for explaining that you cannot prove things about a single permutation using random permutations--it's so obvious that it is very difficult to explain, and the same absurd argument pops over and over.
Road wear depends on weight.
Semi truck tires have hard, slow-wearing compounds.
Semi’s drive 12+ hours a day most days of the year. Passenger cars just go to work and they store and back.
Your estimate isn't even close--you're off by about 4 orders of magnitude.
Fact: In California, the number of trucks is about 300K vs cars at 14M (about 40x).
Fact: California AADT on roads for trucks ranges from a couple of percent up to almost 50%. Very few roads have less than 10% AADT from trucks.
Fact: Damage to roads goes as fourth power of axle load.
Speculation: Given that tires are the primary means to transmit that damage to the roadway, it wouldn't surprise me if the trucks are responsible for the vast majority of tire particulates.
Reference: https://dot.ca.gov/-/media/dot-media/programs/traffic-operat...
In this case, how can the negative externalities actually be mitigated with money? Maybe R&D to develop a less toxic tire?
revenue neutral externality taxes are great policy but terrible politics...
Isn't the plan to basically destroy all regulation in the US from Jan 2025?
This seems like an easily corruptible idea. For example, who measures the negative externalities? Certainly there are many, also certain is the ambiguity in measurement. Plenty of ways to game the system and for the system to play favorites.
It's actually very common to fine manufacturers for negative externalities. We even tax some manufacturers for some negative externalities. For example, we have a federal tax on cigarettes that pay for some health programs.
I personally doubt that the American government has the power to be able to do such things. Regardless, the incoming administration will under no circumstances impose such restrictions, or push for them to be created. I seem to recall that the previous Trump administration removed restrictions around asbestos, to give you an idea.
Libertarians gonna libertarian. Even if it kills everyone.
> Libertarians gonna libertarian. Even if it kills everyone.
Plenty of blue states have shot down additional taxes. When it comes to pigovian taxes, nearly everyone in America is a libertarian.
Oh, absolutely. If you look at voting records, the overlap between neoliberals and libertarians is incredibly strong in this regard.
you folx really hate working class scum, don't you
I try to tell people about this, but people are married to their cars and they're in denial that this is really a problem.
I literally cannot walk or ride a bike where I live. I will get robbed and/or killed and the weather doesn't play nice. Distances to places I need to go are also quite lengthy. Ordering stuff online doesn't solve the problem, they also drive vehicles with tires. It is out of necessity that people in my part of the world are reliant on vehicles, and I assume most other people in other countries are too.
This is a very complex problem that is extremely difficult to solve and shouldn't just be dismissed as people just being married to their cars.
However, I'd love to see a less polluting compound used for vehicle tires, which is also cost effective for the end user. In my country the railroad system is totally buggered due to crime and corruption, so there are trucks everywhere. Reducing reliance on semi trucks for freight could possibly reduce the pollution a bit. In my country at least...
Fwiw ordering online is more efficient on average than driving yourself.
I'd love to see some of the tire wera data that Waymo has accumulated. Despite being heavier vehicles, I bet they do well on tire wear from no hard stops or starts, driving the speed limit, keeping properly inflated, and (I assume) optimizing driving to maintain momentum (e.g. not accelerating into red lights like I see so many human drivers do).
Have you experienced waymo in SF? It actually drives faster than regular folks and brakes much more harder because of that. The speed limit doesn’t apply to the streets of San Francisco and it typically accelerates to the limit as fast as possible (especially electric).
Not in SF, only in Phoenix. My rides seemed much less erratic than a typical Uber ride.
There’s so much waste with every household owning a car. A lot of this could be avoided with affordable mass transit options like high speed trains and subways instead.
tire dust is behind major die offs of juvinile salmon, thete are specific toxic compounds in it, and when therevare major rain events, all the dust in the ditches gets washed into rivers and streams in high enough concentrations to kill all the fish. from memory the toxic compound is some sort of biocide put in tires, to keep them from bieng eaten by ? algea? fungus? whatever, not an important detail, but an additive that can be eliminated or replaced, $$$$$$$$
> biocide
It's an anti-oxidant, to protect tires from UV and ozone degradation.
Tire companies are in the process of switching to a different anti-oxidant.
On previous thread of this topic, someone on hn claimed to have worked in tire industry and that some small additive that would cost few percent extra would largely address thos issue.
What would that additive do to prevent microplastics?
I found the following after a bit of searching. I'm sure there's more work being done.
https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/news/202... Applied Quantum Materials Inc., in Edmonton, Alberta, is developing a specialized reinforcing additive for tires to minimize microplastic release over different road and temperature conditions. Nova Graphene Canada Inc., in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, is developing a graphene-enhanced rubber that could reduce tire-wear shedding and extend the life of tires. Stema Punch and Die Inc., in Cambridge, Ontario, is creating specialized compositions for tires to improve their wear and help stop the shed of microplastics.
And noise pollution! Even electric cars (which are quite heavy and produced a lot of tire wear) create loud roaring at moderate to high speeds for anyone the car is passing.
EVs have the benefit of regen breaking though, which means less break dust contributing to the pollution.
Less than a vehicle of equivalent mass, sure.
EVs are broadly comparable to the ICEV equivalent. We're talking 10-15% difference, sometimes less, and the gap closes a bit every year. Won't be long until EVs are consistently lighter than the gas equivalent.
It's really not that much heavier, less than double. A Model 3 and a 3 series BMW weigh about the same.
sounds about right, I'm surprised it's so low; we should probably stop doing the other things putting microplastics into the environment since they account for 3/4.
tires are an essential part of most people's lives, and even city people who don't have cars rely heavily on wheeled vehicles. When I think about the plastics that I take out into the environment where I subject them to wear, I can't really think of anything apart from tires.
it is not necessary though that 8 tons of energy displacement moves 60 kg individuals. we should absolutely cut down on private transit
Most cars are more like a ton and a half to two tons, not eight.
But in any case, it's not clear that there is a lot of low hanging fruit in cutting down on private transit. Aside from a few outliers, most places with pretty great public transit still have a lot of private transit too. It has many use cases that public transit is unable to fill.
Perhaps street cars and trains could take efficiency even further, with metal wheels.
And maybe put them on rails
And have them run on a regular schedule, within and between cities. Imagine the benefit to the public and the environment. It could even be funded by tax payers.
We used to have that in the flatter parts of Ohio (which is ~most of it), with street cars, and interurban lines linking many of even the tiniest towns together, and with passenger rail between larger cities.
It was privately-funded. It worked.
...until the automobile became more common and people stopped started driving cars instead. (The literal-conspiracy between General Motors and Firestone Tire didn't help, either.)
Here's a map from 1908: https://curtiswrightmaps.com/product/electric-railway-map-of...
At a certain point people will revolt at that suggestion. Most people I know are not going to give up their suburban/rural acres to live in a cramped, walkable city with no space to do everything they love.
There needs to be more choices. American suburbia is on another level I know, but there is no reason you can't have a bit more density, walk-able or bicycle friendly neighbourhoods, centred around amenities and public transport.
But some people will, and the easier we make alternative modes of transportation, the more people will choose them. Want to sit in traffic all day while an LRT zips by? Nobody is stopping you.
I occasionally feel bad for the folks on the LRT alongside I-84 on the days I commute to the office. The traffic is congested and very slow at times, and I still beat the train. And that's even before getting to downtown, where the train just crawls from station to station. I wish we could have a real subway.
I suspect the best option for most suburban cities to reduce traffic and air pollution is to strongly incentivize employers to allow remote work when feasible.
That vehicle would require a commercial license.
The lower limit in most jurisdictions in the US is 13 tons. And also, in most jurisdictions there is an exemption for vehicles used for personal recreation (e.g. you can absolutely drive a Volvo tractor to pull your enormous fifth wheel toy hauler with nothing more than a basic driver's license).
I walk most places and when I don’t walk, I take the train, which has steel (and not rubber) tires.
Genuinely curious if there are any real efforts to address this available to the consumer. In the kind of idiot who will buy more expensive tires because they shed less plastic, but as far as I’m aware I don’t actually have that opportunity.
Michelin is at least looking into it: https://www.michelin.com/en/media/magazine/michelin-is-takin...
Nokia is also working on green tires with more biodegradation
https://www.nokiantyres.com/about-us/news-article/nokian-tyr...
I guess when the tyres wear down it all ends up as bits of microplastic so long life tyres would be better. There tends to be a bit of a trade off between long life and high grip though.
Doesn't address the tires directly, but smaller, lighter cars are available. Maybe greater awareness about pollution from tires would help that become more of a sales factor.
Steel wheels on a steel track don’t have this issue.
In the sense that they don't emit plastic particles, sure. But trains absolutely do create metal particle air pollution.
I think it would be an interesting comparison, given how often our local light rail trains operate nearly empty. If it has less than about 20 people per train car it is toting around more weight per passenger than a private vehicle with just the driver.
Steel dust has the nice property of turning into mostly harmless metal oxides rather quickly.
Iron isn’t the only metal in those wheels, some are more poisonous.
Stainless is mostly iron and chromium, sometimes nickel. Some oxidation states of chromium are indeed toxic, but the most stable form is chromium(III), which is harmless enough that you can buy it as a supplement. Nickel also occurs naturally in soil and many foods and is not accumulating in the body. The kidneys can remove it. Only large doses are problematic.
Huh. Downvoted for mentioning a fact that has been studied in depth and is uncontroversial. You guys crack me up.
Maybe I have this wrong somehow but I thought that could be categorised as "wear".
IE don't buy the tyres that last 1000[preferred units of measure], buy the tyres that last longer.
But then you could get into "performance per unit of wear" and how that is all defined is a wombat hole of discussion.
You would have to make some trade-offs with emissions/fuel economy though. Harder wearing compounds generally lead to higher rolling resistance, which means higher energy use per distance. I’m inclined to think that microplastics pollution might be worse than tailpipe emissions (or electricity generation pollution depending on your source)?, but it wouldn’t be straightforward. While there will probably always be uses for autos, we should encourage other methods of transport whenever possible.
Buy a (motor-)bike and only use the car when you really need it.
And increase your chance of death by 40x?
https://i.redd.it/ybzo8fbxlcm21.png
I would guess most of those deaths are cause by collision with a car. So getting rid of the cars would solve that problem.
You can influence your chance of accidents by driving safely. Or take public transport.
I drive a lot less working from home
I drive a lot more now. But I preferred the old city life, taking the subway to the office instead of driving around the suburbs.
I truly hope this encourages manufacturers to build smaller, lighter, and slower cars.
Why on earth would you think that that would ever happen?
Because governments could mandate it.
Yes, we're at the stage now where democracies need to become far more dictatorial, otherwise their populations will continue mindlessly along the path of 'Tragedy of the Commons'.
You don't even need dictatorial. Just tax breaks and the like for small light vehicles and penalties for large heavy ones.
The only thing that will do that is regulation, either mandating the types of cars we can buy, or taxing the kinds of cars we don't favor.
People in the majority prefer large, powerful cars, given the choice. And those cars already cost a lot, so any strategy of price increases to discourage them will have to be significant. This is why most people in Europe drive small, economical cars. Big cars are heavily taxed, and so is the fuel they use.
I drove smaller cars in Europe simply because bigger cars don't fit in many places. I don't think it has much to do with price.
Small streets mean fewer drivers. That means your overhead demands that you charge more per customer since you have fewer of them.
All that said, smaller roads mean smaller trucks which means more trucks more often which means more tires.
I really wish we could buy a Citroen Ami in the US, which is a small, light, and slow (28 mph top speed) electric car for city driving. Plus, it looks super cute!
The vast majority of people would not buy those.
It depends on the incentives. In Japan the top selling car is the Honda N-Box https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_N-Box which is on the small light and slow side.
The US has dumb mileage policies to get everyone to drive huge trucks, and pretty much bans things like the N-Box.
In Japan you get a parking exemption with cars like the N-Box and it seems quite useable - top speed 87 mph. Review https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/honda-n-box-slash-review-...
I wouldn't mind them bringing in something like that - I'm in the UK where they don't have N-Boxes either but it would do the job and I mostly get around by e-bike these days so I prefer others to drive small light cars.
Depends entirely on price.
I hear this a lot and I am quite skeptical. Price-sensitive buyers do not buy new cars, they buy used ones. What is available on the used market is directly controlled by what the minority of people who buy new cars put their priorities on.
A slower car?
They already make plenty of them
EVs are heavier but I suspect the wear is less than you might think because the braking is gentler with regenerative braking, so less wear on the tyres.
Also, there's quite a bit of pollution from break pads and discs, also reduced because of regenerative braking.
I couldn't find numbers though, with a brief bit of googling.
I’m not sure it’s gentler or in any way different from a tire’s perspective than braking. If I pull my foot off the one pedal driving, the deceleration I get is fairly comparable to about 3/4 braking in an ICE. (Off the top of my head estimate for illustration purposes only.)
But the tires are made of different materials and are different in other ways too. I can tell you first hand you spend far more on tires if you own an EV. Our model y spends more on tires than our giant diesel pickup, and far more than an ICE of similar size. As for the relative amount of microplastics they emit, I really couldn’t know.
You definitely wear your brake pads out far less with an EV. Just eyeing it though, volumetrically, brake pad wear has to be relatively insignificant compared to tire wear.
I’d guess EVs still emit substantially more tire particles, and fewer from brakes but nowhere close to compensating. But I’d not be shocked to death if someone studies it and you turn out to be right.
And on the plus side, those are probably issues materials science could solve (make the tires out of something benign) whereas EVs emit a lot less of other bad things that I’m sure are not easy to solve or they already would have been.
Your hypothesis then, roughly, is that braking causes more pollution when it's more extreme (since the total braking work being done is at least as great -- in practice much greater because of the increased mass), so smoother braking will reduce tire wear.
I'm inclined to believe an extreme version of that hypothesis -- I doubt 200k miles at 1mph would wear the tread substantially -- but in practice I don't think that's the case. Electric cars tend to replace tires around 10k miles sooner, so the net effect of everything involved (heavier cars, regenerative braking, rich young guys driving faster, mostly city driving, ...) is 15-50% more tire wear per mile.
Pretty sure most wear comes from the back tires (I should say the "power tires" to consider FWD vehicles). Many electric vehicles accelerate quite quickly, which just wears their tires even more.
Braking is braking. If you're stopping in N meters, regardless of how the braking force is applied (regenerative brake vs discs), the tire is the artifact taking the load.
Even then, most cars don't routinely brake as hard as they accelerate.
Motorcycles, with their high performance, are notorious for eating rear tires much faster than front tires, and they can't be rotated.
Then, there's my vehicle, full time 4WD (not AWD, there's a difference), it wears its tires quite evenly in contrast to 2WD/AWD vehicles.
Braking is usually much quicker than accelerating, for almost all vehicles (because brakes can absorb much more energy than engines can output). For this reason, I suspect most particulates are caused by breaking.
> Even then, most cars
I believe you mean most drivers. All of this talk about EV tires wearing faster than ICE tires is driven by people accelerating aggressively simply because they now can.
It’s about the weight of the vehicle; aggressive driving just makes it even worse.
EVs are generally quite heavier compared to similar class of ICE vehicles.
Electric cars are mostly drive-by-wire, so if the same driver input results in accelerating faster in an EV then I'd say that's the car's responsibility.
That makes no sense. Every car on the road, regardless of power source, has what amounts to an infinitely adjustable pedal controlling acceleration. The relationship between pedal input and actual acceleration varies between cars, and can vary even on the same car in different drive modes. How fast you accelerate is 100% under your own control.
If you put effort into controlling it, sure. Most people have other priorities, they push the pedal when they want to go and they leave it to the car to accelerate at a reasonable speed when they do. Mass-market cars should be built for the population that exists, and that means having a default accelerator-response that does sensible things for the way that normal people normally use the accelerator.
> Most people ... push the pedal when they want to go and they leave it to the car to accelerate at a reasonable speed when they do.
I'm going to need a source for that. There are literally tens of thousands of accelerator pedal types, with different hinges, different travel, different stiffness and different engines with different ECUs and different drive modes attached to them. There's no one default way to step on the gas that people would just pull out of muscle memory.
I have nothing to back this up other than I'd like to see a comparison between EV's and other luxo models for tire wear. Because the tire design matters a lot when it comes to wear. I'm a bit suspicious about the weight being the primary driver since I have a van that weighs 6000lbs and it doesn't burn through tires.
I can see two things. One maybe EV tires are spec'd to be more sporty. Or possible tires aren't optimized for the extra weight.
Pointed comment: No one but no one cares about higher weight trucks and suv's at all when it comes to tire wear. Only EV's get singled out.
My EV runs through tires way faster than my gas car.
I, too, have a lead foot. EVs are quick, and tires are the price.
There’s quick ICE cars too, but they don’t weigh as much as the 100 or so kWh battery pack in EVs
Typical EVs are about 10-15% heavier than the comparable ICE. Yes it makes a difference, but only marginally. Normal drivers without a lead foot get 10s of thousands of miles from tires, just like ICE vehicles.
Also, few EVs that are not pickups have 100 kWh batteries; more typically 60-75.
2024 Mazda3 Sedan: 3,124 to 3,395 lbs
2024 Tesla Model3: 3,862 to 4,054 lbs
That's 20% heavier, and it gets worse when you look at EVs not built from ground up by legacy manufacturers.
A mazda 3 is a sub-compact, and a Model 3 is a mid-size. At least compare it to a mazda 6, which is also a mid-size:
2024 Mazda6: 3,437 to 3,582 lbs
model3 is a mid-size sedan much like mazda3; even the marketing depts agree, but sure whatever makes you happy.
2024 Tesla Model S: 4,560 to 4,776 lbs
What are you talking about? Model 3 is larger in every single dimension, in some by a lot.
https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/mazda-3-2019-5-door...
Because you’re comparing the hatchback version.
https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/mazda-3-2017-sedan-...
I'd say it's slightly worse, mainly because when you first get the car you tend to launch it a few times and take advantage of all the power. My first set of tires only lasted 27k miles.
After a year you drive normally, I get about 35k miles out of 40k mile rated tires, similar to my old Audi.
My wife doesn't buy that argument. To her, when I have regen braking on, we slow down a lot more than we would otherwise with the brakes. It could just be the way I'm driving though.
Cool, let’s make tyres that degrade when in small chunks with high surface area. It’ll cost a bit more to replace them every few years (since they’ll also degrade a bit more whilst on the car) but will be a far better solution than the kneejerk “lol ban all the cars” stuff.
I remember asking adults about this when I was probably seven years old. Once I learned that tires wore down, eventually smooth, it made sense to me that the material had to go somewhere. No one really had much of a good answer as to where it all went.
I think the bulk is dust on the road that gets washed off by rain and down the gutter. But some goes in the air.
Like many efforts (effective or otherwise) to solve environmental problems, fixing this might require new tyres sold to environmentally conscious consumers initially, to prove that it can be done. Cost effectiveness comes later, paired with government regulations.
I'm assuming there are currently no tyres on the market that contain nothing that degrades into microplastics, but please correct me if I'm wrong.
Streetcars, subways and LRTs do not require new fancy tire compounds to stop releasing microplastics. Their brake pads can, though, although I imagine that regenerative braking helps somewhat.
Bicycles are so lightweight that the amount they release is negligible compared to a car.
I wonder if rubber-tyred metros like the Montreal metro and some Paris metro lines release a lot of microplastics?
Could possibly filter it out at exhausts
Agreed, and I like all those forms of transport, and use some of them when I can. But I do have to drive sometimes (for a certain definition of 'have to' of course).
We're not going to win these things by saying "just don't drive". Driving less is part of the solution, but it's not going to work by itself.
Can they make tires without these problems?
Probably. Mentioned a couple manufacturers working on greener tires: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42273418
Tyres trade material for grip, so, I think it's unlikely.
Sure. They already do. We use them on bikes.
Bikes have completely different needs and are very light compared to cars. It's apples to oranges.
Both are sufficient modes of transport, one a death machine and the other much broader use.
Totally, bicycles are much more popular worldwide than heavy cars that have little regard for the safety of pedestrians.
Rubber is not a plastic
Most tires are not made from natural rubber, but from synthetics.
Yet, it is still not literally a plastic by definition. I feel the term “plastic” is already demonized enough, and now it often serves as a generic umbrella term for alarmist purposes.
Quick, let's make something more expensive! Everything is killing people and everything needs taxing more, naturally.
It's OK because I myself can afford it and we can just tell poor people to use the public transport that doesn't exist.
The public transport that does exist is also expensive and/or unreliable because ideology in government is that cars are better. But that's also ok, I think, anyway doesn't affect me
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Sarcasm aside people really need to stop this reflexive "scientists say X is bad" -> more taxes and higher prices reaction.
I guess we can ignore all these problems and keep making the environment worse, as an alternative strategy. I don't have any kids, but I hope yours are going to be ok.
> If the pollution is from tires, then tax tires.
Tax tires, move worn tires to a recycling plant, bill a recycling tax when the owner buys a new tire...
... and then set fire to the tires, keep the money for recycling safe in your pocket, and then keep lying about how good is that we "recycle" things.
"In Spain, a recycling plant burns every four days, a figure that has increased since 2018. In 2023, the record was broken with 109 recycling plants that were [deliberately] set on fire" [1]
"In 2019, a tire recycling plant in Seseña burned for days. This fire produced pollution greater than that generated by the city of Madrid for a whole year" [1]
Or grind it and put the stuff in each children park, as currently.
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[1] (In Spanish) https://www.cuatro.com/noticias/sociedad/20240130/alerta-aum...
It's not exactly the point of this story, but I found a way to reduce the number of waste tires I generate.
Tires with 6/32" to 8/32" of tread are a scam. They get flats, and wear down to the legal minimum (in Texas) of 3/32" very quickly.
I buy tires with 19/32" of tread. No nail has yet managed to go through 19/32" of tread (or that much air gap) plus through the equivalent of a 10-ply design to puncture my tire, at least not until I wear them down to 6/33".
If we wanted puncture-proof, run-flat, handle-like-touring-tires, last-forever tites, we could have them. They are out there.
I confess I am disappointed that nobody is bothering to mention paint being the leading contributer. Guessing textiles are also higher.
As someone that bikes or walks over driving, it is still frustrating how much we'd rather blame driving over anything else.
Got a source on paint?
I just followed links in this article. https://tireindustryproject.org/faq/are-tires-the-main-sourc... is the link in the article, which relies on https://www.e-a.earth/plastic-paints-the-environment/.
I confess confusion, here, as the article links in this as support of the tire claim. Which is in contradiction to what it says. Specifically, the article links it as support of a 28% claim, when the link is challenging that number.
Some places in India require by law that plastic waste goes into roads.
Think how much plastic that will release.
This looks like a good time to remind that forcing people back in the office means forcing a ton of people to use cars, most likely with a single passenger (the driver) through long commute. They'll emit a bunch of CO2 and pollution in the environment and they'll shed a ton of micro-plastics in the environment through car tires.
And don't even bother commenting about electric cars or whatever: electric cars are a minority of the vehicles in circulations, there are a ton of SUVs and the majority of people live far from their workplace and will have to use cars anyway. People living in cities at walking distance from their workplace or served by functioning/efficient/effective public transport are a small lucky minority.
We should really push for public transport (ON RAILS!) and for more work-from-home arrangements.
Well, maybe people will stop frowning at me for wearing my wicking running shirts now.
We just need to make the tires out of better stuff
It's disappointing they don't list any sort of detailed solutions or future tech. All they do is promote taxation and mention that tire innovation can help.
Related: tire wear rate is proportional to (total weight / number of axles)^4.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
This has serious implications for the future of automobile development in the age of heavy batteries.
Thats stress on the road, as in things like the road surface, not tire wear. The physics about what's happening to the tire surface are pretty different from what's happening to the road.
Asphalt is a petroleum product, so it's not irrelevant. But even so you're missing some physics in your comment.
Considering that friction is symmetric, road wear implies tire wear and vice versa, at roughly the same order of magnitude of severity, relative to respective hardnesses. Tires are generally softer than road surfaces, so they wear faster than roads.
> Asphalt is a petroleum product,
Uhh, what? Not all roads are asphalt, tons aren't. But even then that's irrelevant. If I made the tire out of Vaseline would it have the same wear characteristics? After all it's also made of petroleum.
Road wear isn't just about the friction. A lot of it is the stresses of the road surface being squished into the ground and deformed. If you've ever seen a boat planing over the water, the road surface kind of wants to make a similar pattern but due to rigidity it can't quite do that. So the internal stresses of the system of the road surface are pretty radically different than the layers of a tire being stretched and pressed into an air bubble.
Assigning blame is less interesting to me than whether there are potential avenues for an alternative that both serves as tires and avoids this micro plastics issue.
Whatever became of the tweel?