And brake dust, which includes a lot of metal
Also to give a personal anecdote, in my Volvo XC60 PHEV, I've just had the inspection done and after 24k miles the brake pads are 5% worn. That's insane for a 2.2 tonne SUV with 400bhp. If it wasn't a PHEV I can guarantee that the pads would be nearly worn by now.
Of course it's depends on how you drive, but if you are not getting 100k miles out of your brakes the problem is not the car but the driver.
This is just false. If you get 100k in your non-EV before having to replace at least your front brake pads, you must be racking up highway miles.
This is not true. At least for Teslas, the brake pedal only controls the friction brakes (they are hydraulically coupled). Same with a Chevy bolt. Unsure on other EVs
Almost every other EV (and hybrid) on the market does blended regen with the brake pedal. Regen is applied when you first press on the brake pedal. As long as the pressure is mild to moderate, regen is used. If you press hard (as in emergency braking) the friction brakes are engaged. When you get below about 10mph the friction brakes are also applied as regen is minimal at that speed. The result is that these cars will do regen whether you are using one pedal driving or not and their brakes will wear much less often.
I’m not sure why Tesla doesn’t do blended regen. Early one the manufacturers didn’t have the algorithms tuned and you could feel the transitions but that has not been the case for several year. It seems that Tesla just never bothered. They seem to expect you to only use one-pedal driving and some people do.
One think to watch for if you only use one-pedal driving, your friction brake pads can get rusty from disuse. Then when you do press on the brake pedal, the brakes may grab or may not decelerate as quickly as expected. Some people find that their brake pads are actually frozen from rust and don’t work at all. It is a good idea to once in a while use those friction brakes to scrub off the surface rust.
So with regen I get variable braking, but I get a reward (more range and less brake wear) if I plan ahead enough to make it work. However if there is surprise or immediate need for more braking then the brake pedal is there. So it's pretty much the best of both worlds, once you get used to it.
I generally drive only using regen, because I can tell. If you remove the feedback it's going to be harder, especially since the level of regen available can radically differ based on temperature and level of charge.
So do you want regen to be invisible? Or do you want better range, efficiency, and brake wear?
It looks like this:
https://www.swedespeed.com/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,onerror...
On a Tesla you just lift the throttle, and if that's not enough you are aware of it, and change your driving patterns accordingly.
With a mixed setup, how do you know when and how much the brakes are involved? Doubly so when it's too cold, or the battery is too full for regen.
I can’t find an English wiki article, but here is German
It's definitely preferable to grinding brakes to slow the vehicle both because of the reduced wear/pollution and extended range gained from the small bit of charging that occurs.
EVs are a couple hundred pounds heavier in average than an equivalent ICE car. In terms of road wear, it's still a rounding error compared to industrial trucks.
That means you deal twice the damage by increasing weight by only 20%. Seems in line with electric car weight difference.
A typical garbage truck has 2 or 3 axles. Let's assume 3 to be conservative. A fully loaded garbage truck weighs around 50,000 pounds. That's 16.6k pounds per axle, vs a Tesla Y's 2.2k pounds per axle.
Doing the math, a single garbage truck does as much road wear as ~3,300 teslas.
Seriously, a Model 3 is ~500 lbs heavier than Honda Accord, and a Model Y is significantly heavier than a Model 3.
But to your point, a bmw 430 is also around 500 pounds heavier than a Honda Accord. Nobody sees a BMW and freaks out about tire wear. But people seem to hyperfixate on any small negative of EVs.
At the heaviest weights, yes, but the heaviest Accord weight and the lightest 430i weight are only 148 lbs apart... and the Model Y can weigh in almost 400 lbs heavier than the heaviest of 430i's.
> Nobody sees a BMW and freaks out about tire wear.
You mean, so long as it's not an EV? ;-)
Seriously, nobody freaks out about a BMW 430i's tire wear, because that of the branding of the car. It's like freaking out over coffee increasing your heart rate.
> But people seem to hyperfixate on any small negative of EVs.
We're obviously talking to different people. At least the folks I know talk about how crazy heavier cars keep getting across the board (case in point: https://www.capitalone.com/cars/learn/finding-the-right-car/...).
The non performance models are similar as well, the current BMW 3141-4023 pounds (the AWD are of course on the heavier side, and the Tesla model 3 is 3814 pounds.
My guesstimate is if they can increase the energy density of batteries by 30-50% the weight penalty will disappear. Some of the reduction is the weight reduction of the battery and some is due to cascading effects on the rest of the car.
Complaining about the 9000lb EV hummer makes for some great circle jerks among the demographics that hate people who drive normal hummers but the road basically doesn't care about them.
I hear this a lot, but how much pollution is it really? It surely doesn't register on any municipal particulate measurement station.
I'd like narrower lanes, bump outs raised intersections and crosswalks to slow traffic. Reduce curb cuts and driveways to cut down on conflicts - thinking Dutch style access streets and alleys that connect to the less interrupted travel lane.
The added benefit of lower speeds would make it safer for bikes and pedestrians and reduce auto crash fatalities.
Slower steady speeds would reduce stooa go, dropping noise and particulate emission from acceleration.
Major American cities have too many extremely poor people which creates a negative vortex that’s hard to escape. Being poor in a city is the worst way to try to climb out of poverty.
Wait, we…do…have public transport. Effective and useful public transport. In NYC 60% of people commute with it. Boston, DC, SF, Chicago, Philadelphia… You might have a specific gripe because it doesn’t take you exactly where you want to go with exactly the comfort you think you need, but these places have public transit that is good enough for hundreds of thousands or even millions to use every day
Even Caltrain gets rowdy on the game days, particularly with people on the bike cars refusing to give way to bikers boarding/deboarding in the intermediate stops. While this only happens occasionally, it made me miss my stop enough times (in addition to lack of safety with last mile biking) to completely give up on Caltrain.
Homeless are attracted to free services, which are often abundant in cities.
> the worst way to try to climb out of poverty.
I disagree, as anyone who wants to work can find more help wanted signs in cities than along interstate in rural Nebraska.
I don't personally think it's realistic to expect everybody/all people (who mainly work for a living/work hard) to ask them to give up the luxury of spending their hard earned money on being able to transport themselves (to and from their job) in something other than the comfort of their own car. I think you're suggesting "we should all be doing public transport, it's more efficient."
You aren't wrong, but there's a human/emotional element/aspect here.
A car to me is a personal, climate controlled cocoon, where I can turn on whatever music I want, have a coffee or a snack, and escape for the 30 minutes or however long it takes to reach my destination...without the chance of being bothered by anyone else, much less any of the other belligerents that you are sure to find on public transit from time to time.
I will continue to own and drive my own car for this simple fact...
In the summer bike is nice alternative, but during bad weather there's nothing comparable to the comfort of car.
Please remember not everyone lives in bay area with long commute and mild weather :-)
A 15min commute as you have is a different situation (much better!). Nobody is trying to take away your car. I realize that it is often framed that way in US media, as if the options are public transport OR private cars. I have a car in the Netherlands which I use for some trips where public transport is not the better choice. But when possible, especially when going from one major city to another, public transport is such a nice luxury. (It also means I can go have fun at that late night party and never face the decision of whether to drive somewhat inebriated or not.)
But yes, if we try to complement them, not just ban, this is very reasonable. I also travel by train quite often because it's simply very convenient compared to car.
I thought all the wfh keyboard careers moved to surf town or ski town!
They can still crash into you. Belligerance also exist behind the wheel, and it can can kill you.
I get it might not be exactly the same, but walking/biking/Public Transiting with headphones in for a period of time is all that and more. And with the exception of a bike, you can do all of those things without having to sit in traffic...
I think GP's point is that it's more about space than about travel. Walking, or being on a public transport with headphones on, doesn't replace that - it's at most a very poor substitute.
The point is to be able to hide from other people - to have some minimum personal time, in a personal space, free from nagging and expectations of your spouse, children, friends, co-workers and bosses. Driving in a car to work enables this, because for the duration of your commute, you can ignore everyone's calls and requests guilt-free. It's the law that says you can't pick up a phone on the road. It's dangerous. You're also not driving for fun, you're driving to/from work. Nobody can have any expectations of you during that time. Yes, commute in traffic is torture. That's a feature. It gives you plausible deniability.
I may be breaking some unwritten fight club rule by spelling it out loud. Sorry. Also, I don't drive - to work or otherwise. But to the extent what I described above is a major part of car ownership, more and better public transport won't help, because it doesn't address this major part.
Long ago I briefly shared an office with an "old guy" - an expert in a particular topic which gave him more freedom to behave strangely and not get fired. His strange behavior was to spend half of his lunch hour at his desk, leaned back, mouth wide open, napping. That was traditionally not acceptable behavior in a professional environment, but he apparently decided it was for him. So he did it. While it was a bit of a shock at first to the other employees, eventually we all became accustomed to it and even kept our voices down in the hallway outside when we new it was his nap time.
The point is that we have the freedom, even if it seems scary, to make some decisions about how we want our lives and how to get the balance we need. I am only just starting to learn how to do this.
The commute drive solo time is clearly not the same quality of solo time as many other options (choose your favorite).
When I had young children and a busy house, and my normal full time job, the bathroom was my solo space. Unsurprisingly, people didn't seem too interested to come bother me when I was in there. So I would read entire books while seeking solitude. Instead, it is conceivable that I could have just gathered everyone and made some agreements about what we all need, including sometimes privacy and quiet. Granted, a toddler will not respect those agreements, but the spouse can help ensure it works most of the time.
I love your bathroom example, because it speaks to the same need as the "car commute solo space". You say:
> it is conceivable that I could have just gathered everyone and made some agreements about what we all need, including sometimes privacy and quiet
And the same is be true of me (having small children too), and of the aforementioned commuters. We could. But, for some reason, we don't. Can't explain it, but the very idea feels truly scary. That's why the comment upthread resonated so well with me - I don't drive, but I understand striving to get "solo time" in a way that doesn't have to be justified directly, but instead is a plausibly deniable side effect of some external necessity (like having to commute to work).
This would probably make some people uncomfortable, but one fantasy I can imagine which might be nice is to have private transport capsules. We could own our own capsule and decorate/style it to our liking. It has common exterior form factor, with power, plumbing, etc. connectors.
We go from home to the nearest capsule station (where ours is in automated storage). We schedule picking of the capsule so it is ready for us upon our arrival. We set the destination, hop in, and the delivery system takes us for a ride. Hell, with a nice private capsule you could sleep, watch movies, work, even have "fun" with a partner. The system (ideally) ensures you arrive at your desired capsule station end point, whereby you exit and set your storage option.
This would take more space than current public transport (a lot more!), but it would take less space than a typical individual car, not to mention less roads as the exchange systems would be optimized and operating in three dimensions.
Anything that's giving you a per-person riding experience is not going to perform as well as batching a bunch of people together for a common ride.
Distributed systems that have to coordinate multiple moving parts are more prone to breakage, and single points of failure.
Not to mention the infrastructure that's required to build millions of what it sounds like are indivdiual train cars (albeit, much smaller), and the tracks required to get people to where they're going.
You're reinventing the train, but worse there... (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvvA_GToc0M&ab_channel=AdamS...)
Better would be to make train cars with seats that have better isolation for people traveling in small groups. But honestly, I think we're overestimating the number of people that need this. And there's a small possibly they could still be serviced by a small car in a world where 80% of people are able to use other services.
I totally get this, and I was in the same situation for many years (the young children period of my life).
However, imagine that instead of a 1hr commute, the commute was 30 minutes. Now your day has 1 hour "free" that you could choose to spend doing something for yourself. Maybe it's gym time, or maybe a music practice room in a building near your office, or yoga in the garden of the office rooftop.
As I say, I did share that same feeling when I was doing the normal commute/family thing. But it still points to a problem. We should be able to find or make the time and space to have a cocoon of calm or whatever we need and still have a life+family+work. I don't think that a small side-effect of solo driving in traffic which provides something like that cocoon is at all the right way to get the life balance we need.
Societies don't need to ask citizens to choose a given mean of transport; they can route their choices them by making some means more convenient and other ones less.
Increasing car costs and reducing lanes/streets/parkings, while making the public transport more frequent/extensive/comfortable, will make citizens choose public transport (or more sustainable means) themselves.
On the other hand, when cities are developed (in certain cultures or at least areas) with private transport in mind, and it can be hard or impossible to redesign for public transport.
I'm reading that as, "we don't need to ask, we can just make them do it." Which to me is pretty arrogant.
Big eu cities are expensive to park cars. Not inexpensive. Some cities such as Stockholm are banning commuter cars.
From the US-centric view, society (or rather, energy and automotive companies and their lobbying) has made the decision to put all the focus on cars, and to even put intentional negative spin against public transport.
It seems to be slowly changing in some states or a few cities within some states. And yes, it does seem to be very different depending on which way an area leans politically. The "red" (Republican) areas are vehemently against public transport and frame it as the government trying to take away people's rights to go where they want (in their own cars).
Unfortunately for the areas trying to put energy into public transport and non-car alternatives, there is a vast amount of corporate finance and influence that works against it at all levels of govenerment.
It was never "asked" in first place; there was a large discussion on HN around the article about automakers driving the policies (https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history).
It's also not forcing anybody; it's a shift of conveniences. In a hypothetical situation with fantasy metrics, making a city 2x as comfortable for sustainable means (bikes, motorbikes, public transport) and 0.5x as comfortable for cars will not force anybody to use the former - people who love their time in the cars will still be able to.
(I stress that this applies to cities where logistics make a restructuring possible, which is not the case everywhere)
I think the answer lies in things like e-bikes, mopeds, and motorcycles. Rail as a high-speed backbone and an e-bike for last-mile sounds close to ideal - especially if I can charge the bike while on the train. Bike lanes ought to be the rule rather than the exception. Bike racks and moped/motorcycle parking spaces (ideally - again - with outlets for charging batteries) could and should be ubiquitous.
It's not about taking away people's cars, it's about making public transit so good (and building cities/neighborhoods that you don't need a car in), that you don't want to take a car, because it's less convenient.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muPcHs-E4qc&t=569s&ab_channe...
I think this quote really nails it: "A developed country is not where the poor have cars, it's where the rich use public transit"
It's also worth noting that car driving is the worst kind of positive feedback loop (not a positive thing). Cars need Parking, which makes it harder to put things close together, which makes you need to drive places to get there, which makes you need parking. And cars are much bigger than humans, so the amount of space needed for cars, also increases much bigger than it would for humans.
But 115km each way (230km round trip) 5 days per week is a problem. We should not be doing this, at least not in individual cars. That electric car is still creating a lot of particulate pollution from the tires on the road, not to mention its contribution to general traffic.
The focus should be on how to reduce the commute distance (or eliminate it as often as possible), and to build/use efficient mass transit systems.
So much of our intellectual and financial energy seems to be directed toward overclocking the horse and buggy - with diminishing returns. At some point it's time to step back and rethink the greater system. (I believe that point was 20+ years ago, when it became clear that cities would continue to become the population growth centers.)