Every study I've seen concurs that EVs chew through tires faster than their equivalent ICE vehicle, and generate more tire particulate matter accordingly. The reasons (torque and weight) are unambiguously greater in an equivalent EV vs ICE.

EVs do generate lower brake particulate matter, by virtue of not using them as much (otherwise they'd also be prone to generating more in a (faulty) per-engagement direct comparison).

Could you link these studies?

Studies are always good, but it almost trivially follows that the tread loss must go somewhere.

EV specific tires have basically eliminated the difference in tread loss already. And because there's public pressure on this, the toxicity of the materials and tires is decreasing rapidly.

Every study I've seen from people pushing on this uses very old information about tires, proving there's a problem really requires updated work taking these things into consideration.

Can I put these EV specific tires on my ICE to get super-duper tread life?

(and have the tire companies been conspiring to make tires disposable?)

Yes, and yes. Though with a lower mass vehicle you may have reduced grip.

Grip is proportional to downforce times the coefficients of friction. Since downforce comes mostly from vehicle weight the maximum available acceleration/deceleration (grip) is nearly identical across lighter and heavier vehicles for a given tire compound and tread pattern.

The complexity comes from things like sidewall stiffness (controls available grip near the lateral limit of traction, must be designed for vehicle mass), suspension geometry (tire camber affects maximum grip), tire width (affects contact patch size relative to mass of the vehicle, tire pressure, camber, and sidewall stiffness), and suspension spring rate and dampening (wheel hop, changing camber angle from body roll).

"Since downforce comes mostly from vehicle weight the maximum available acceleration/deceleration (grip) is nearly identical across lighter and heavier vehicles for a given tire compound and tread pattern."

What? Was this written by AI?

It's literally just physics. Couloumb (static, or dry) friction is F_f = μF_n where F_f is the frictional force (grip) of tires in this case and F_n is the normal force between the ground and the tires due to the mass of the vehicle. μ ranges from 0.8 to 1 or more in modern tires.

Since F=ma and F_n is 9.8 N/kg due to gravity, F_f = μ * 9.81 * m and a = F/m = μ * 9.81 * m / m, and finally a = μ * 9.81 m/s^2.

Oh I get what you're saying. You get more grip, but the vehicle also has that much more momentum.

I agrée with this and have ripped claims about the pollution here on HN before, but there is SOME pollution, and it is necessarily worse for EVs vs ICE for the reasons above.

Can you share them? Because physics says that damage to roads scales quadratically with weight. Not sure why tires would not experience a similar increase.

At the very least, these tires are subject to higher forces due to the heavier weights of EVs. Intuitively, consistently applying higher friction forces to an object would cause higher wear.

The weights aren’t really that much higher than ICE cars, but I don’t think anyone who has owned an EV would say they don’t go through tires faster. They do. How much due to weight, how much due to better acceleration, I don’t know, but they definitely are harder on tires.

Some factors I think are involved, but I don't see mentioned - EVs produce more readily available torque in general, and also tire choice heavily factors in EV range (low rolling resistance), which has a negative impact on tread life

Three or four years ago, yes. Newer EV specific tires don't seem to be wearing faster.

Unfortunately Nissan did not put such a tire on my Ariya. Good range and very quiet but very soft and only 9/32 from factory means lots of people have to replace em after 15 to 20k.

I’m replacing earlier given poor snow and rain performance. They can have em back when my lease is up.

Understood, but that's Nissan sucking.

EVs use different tires from the factory than regular cars to help increase efficiency, maybe it's about the type of tire?

That’s a factor too. My stock tires were quite soft, though they were a tire that was also used on non EVs in Nissans lineup.

I would imagine it's just tire formulation choices. Tractor trailers get extremely high mileage from their tires, but there is lots more weight on each tire. And train wheels... what is the load and mileage on those?

> damage to roads scales quadratically with weight

It’s much worse, it actually scales quartically with weight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

It is absolutely true when you add in the road wear and particulate matter from that caused by heavier EVs.