I see articles like this about microplastics turning up in the environment and it doesn't surprise me at all. Almost a century of millions and millions of cars going through tires how could it not. In the future they'll ask what killed everyone? It was tires man. Tires.
And with EV the problem would be bigger as the frequency of replacing EV tires is higher due to heavier weights of EVs.'Emissions Analytics found that a single car sheds almost nine pounds of tire weight per year, on average. Globally, that amounts to 6 million metric tons of tire pollution annually, with most of it coming from wealthier countries where personal car use is more prevalent.
The amount of tire pollution emitted per vehicle is increasing as more electric cars hit the road around the world — some 14 million of them this year, according to the International Energy Agency. EVs tend to be significantly heavier than gas-powered or hybrid cars due to their larger, heftier batteries. The average battery for an EV on the market today is roughly 1,000 pounds, with some outliers approaching 3,000 pounds — as much as an entire gasoline-powered compact car.'
> Emissions Analytics found that a single car sheds almost nine pounds of tire weight per year, on average.
Is that referring to EVs? That number is surprising considering a tire only weighs ~25lbs. 9lbs/year means the tires are half-gone (and long since threadbare) in 5 years.
It is referring to the total from all four tires i.e. 4 kg per car per year [1].
Please note that car tires or anything really won't have uniform degradation. The first year will lose a lot of mass, then once the outer material is shed, there will be far less shedding [2]. So I understand the above number as global tire shedding in a year/total number of cars.
P.S. I just looked it up. I have no idea if the source is reliable.
Multiple sources suggest that 9 pounds is possible but on the very high end. It seems like something closer to 5 pounds is more usual. Being thread bare by 3-4 years seems common if you’re a relatively heavy commuter.
I am surprised. I thought it was a lot less. I’m worried by this too, knowing so many people drive on their tires much longer.
> EVs tend to be significantly heavier than gas-powered or hybrid cars due to their larger, heftier batteries. The average battery for an EV on the market today is roughly 1,000 pounds, with some outliers approaching 3,000 pounds — as much as an entire gasoline-powered compact car.'
This is basically oil industry propaganda. It's like saying "the average internal combustion engine is roughly 1,000 pounds[1], with some outliers approaching 3000 pounds[2] -- as much as an entire electric compact car[3]."
EV batteries weigh more than gas tanks per unit energy but EV motors weigh less than petrol engines and don't need transmissions, exhaust and emissions controls, large water cooling systems, etc. The result is that EVs weigh around the same as ICE cars of the same size, e.g. Tesla Model 3 vs. BMW 3-series. The difference is typically less than 10-20% and it can be zero.
The premise that they weigh a lot more mostly comes from the rarity of subcompact EVs, so then people compare EVs (typically midsized cars or larger) to the lighest ICE cars (subcompacts) and it's heavier because it's bigger. Here's an ebike with a >200 mile range that weighs under 100 pounds:
There is no reason you couldn't make a subcompact EV with that range that weighs the same as subcompact ICE vehicles. But EV production is still constrained by battery production, so they put the batteries into premium vehicles, which are bigger. And then people claim that they're heavier, even though there's nothing intrinsic about that.
Moreover, newer battery chemistries with a better energy density would make them lighter. Even 20-30% improvements would make a large difference because the battery makes up such a large fraction of the weight of the car. If anyone gets a battery chemistry production-ready that uses oxygen from the air as one of the reactants, ICE cars would be without purpose.
There’s nothing in your comment that actually backs the idea that EVs will make the problem significantly worse.
Yeah, batteries weigh a lot, but everything else weighs less. A battery can be a structural component, an ICE engine cannot.
I think you will find a bias towards heavier weight if you compare EVs and ICE cars actually sold. But in recent years car makers have focused mostly on crossovers/SUVs for EVs, because that’s where they make the most margins. VW launched their new line with ID.4, Hyundai with Ioniq 5, Kia with EV 6. But all of these car makers are launching smaller lighter models now. An EV SUV is heavier than an ICE, I’ll grant you that. We need a bit better energy density to make a reasonable light SUV, but a smaller car doesn’t have to be more heavy than an ICE equivalent.
I recently had to change tires on our old 2015 Kia Soul EV. Not because they were worn down, but because they’re too old. There still plenty of tread depth left. It has been driven a completely average amount in that period.
There are anecdotes from car fleet operators who say they don’t see any significant difference between their EVs and ICE.
I’m willing to bet that driving style can have much more impact, and EVs can go both ways. Due to high torque you can drive more aggressively and chew through tires. You’ll certainly find stories of EV drivers like this. But you can also enable ECO mode and one-pedal driving, which I’m sure will result in way less jerk on the tyres than what most people can achieve with an ICE cars. It’s really easy to drive super smoothly with EVs, and I think most people will prefer that style of driving. Especially if it becomes common knowledge that it saves both on energy cost and avoids premature tire replacements.
I’m not too worried about the long term trend here. Car makers have so many incentives to drive down the weight of battery packs as it has exponential impact on costs. There are several next generation battery chemistries in early stage production phases that can potentially eliminate the weight disadvantage for a reasonable battery size.
It's tires. Millions of cars and their tire wear for literally the last hundred years. How can it not be in our bodies and causing issues at this point.
That’s a factor for sure, especially with the finding (that was posted last week on HN) that there are tire compounds in leafy greens. But it’s almost certainly also due to the use of various plastics in everything; even if you’re drinking from a glass bottle it most likely passed through plastic at some point.
I also entertain the idea that the “feminization” that appears to have occurred since the 50’s is due to (micro)plastics and PFAS being literal ligands of the estrogen receptor, and their well documented endocrine disrupting effects. I recall some study found that 100% of males tested had microplastics in their testes.
That’s essentially the problem. Everything is plastic because plastic is cheap and versatile, but surprise, it’s also bad for you! Maybe in a century after a bunch of bickering on whether or not it’s really bad, if it’s worth solving, and lobbying by every industry against any potential hit to revenue, it’ll finally get solved, and then we get to find out all the problems with the solution, rinse and repeat.
I wonder how hemp would work out as a replacement, it seems pretty promising - stable, biodegradable, likely inert, and versatile (it can be used for containers, textiles, paper, and a lot more). For degradation, (GMed) fungi or bacteria seem like a potential avenue, surely nothing could go wrong with that.
People use synthetic fabric sheets, pillow cases, not to mention mattresses. Most pillows are filled with plastic. We cover our bodies in plastic, then wash our clothes and microplastics enter the wastewater system.
Rubber tires aren't new, they've been around for 120 years. If there has been an uptick in IBD in the past few decades that didn't exist for the first 80 years of the 20th century, you'd have to suspect a number of different things before tires.
Tires have been around for a while, but the average weight of a personal car greatly increased after the 80's. Sure there were some heavy land-boats in the 50's and 60's, but it seems now everyone is driving something 3.5k lbs or higher.
Also consider the expansion of the US highway system (starting in '56), increased freight trucking, popularity of tuning / high performance cars etc. I'd imagine more tires are getting shredded into the environment than at any point before the 80's, even with improvements in tire compounds.
Cars were even heavier in the 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s. They had steel bodies, chrome bumpers, massive trunks, V8 engines too. It wasn't until the oil crisis in the late 70s and the introduction of Japanese brands that cars got small.
Take a look at a 1950s Coup de Ville, Buick Roadmaster or any other famous models from that era. All pushing 4K, sometimes 5K pounds.
Synthetic plastics, synthetic pipes, Tetrapak packaging, BPA can linings, BPA receipt paper… we’ve had a Cambrian explosion of plastics in the past several decades
I think it's clear. Tires. Tires are what's killing everyone. Or at least contributing more than we'd like to admit. Rise in cancer among young people, microplastics in the ocean, among a litany of other health issues on the rise. A hundred years of tire wear and industry is making itself known.
You have to wonder if Giannandrea is what's been holding Siri back all these years. What can you point to that he's significantly improved at Apple since coming from Google in 2018? And now he's luke-warm on LLMs? Seems like someone we should be seeing present Apple's AI strategy at this year's WWDC keynote, no?
True. Seems like now would be his moment to take center stage (literally at WWDC in about a week). His title is "Senior Vice President Machine Learning and AI Strategy". We've seen Ternus present. Srouji too. Sure would instill some confidence to hear directly from the AI Strategy SVP on what they've been working on and what they have planned. Turning Siri over to OpenAI sounds like a defeat for him.
I'm surprised OpenAI's own legal team or PR hasn't come up with a boilerplate response to these type of questions yet. Seems like something they should expect to be asked and be prepared for by now?
Feel like the real question is what is the purpose of work, if not to feed the all powerful need to consume. Perhaps we need to look at the consumption end of things. Consume less. Work less.
The entire system we built during the last 200 years revolves around consuming more and working more, the inertia makes it nearly impossible to even imagine something else at that point (as we can see by reading the comments on this very thread)
