Electric cars produce far less brake dust pollution than combustion-engine cars

It’s just trivially easy with electric thanks to regen braking.

Though with modern cars getting heavier if you have a small ICE these days you have almost no engine brake which makes some cases more difficult (unless it’s a mild hybrid with an electric kers like some of the small engined fords). SUVs tend to have giant engines and pretty high rolling resistance, which I’d think would somewhat compensated for their higher inertia.

It’s all about learning your car’s behaviour and planning for it.

You can do it in an automatic, you just have to force it to select a lower gear using the gear number options (1, 2, 3, 4) or using the tiptronic mode. The lower gear means the engine will displace more air in the same amount of time, increasing the rate it pulls energy from the wheels.

People think you can't do it in automatics because they try very hard to keep engine RPM low where the effect is diminished.

The key takeaway is that there are differences to driving an EV to driving an ICE vehicle. Equally those differences are in fact easy to adjust to given a bit of practice.

Of course cars have always had different control options. Automatic and Manual gearboxes spring to mind. When I first learned some cars had a gear selector as an arm on the steering column, and so on.

EVs like a somewhat gentler foot, because the torque is instant, so a heavy foot is likely to be a more uncomfortable ride.

So yes, different cars, different styles. But of course we adjust very quickly, and its not really difficult to drive anything- it just takes a bit of practice.

Are you not? Do you drive by blipping the gas every few seconds?

I've had Uber drivers do this and it is annoying bordering on nauseating as a passenger. It is probably pretty bad for mileage and transmission wear as well (constantly taking up and releasing the backlash in the gears).

Secondly, I rented an EV for a week and by the end of it actually preferred the strong regen setting. It was convenient in stop-start traffic, and on a twisty road, you could use it to tighten the nose as you entered the corner.

All to say, check out a few to be sure, im still shocked how much i love driving this thing (and how criminally fast it is, totally absurd).

> was difficult to get used to

To ask the obvious, how used to something are you going to get on a test drive? It takes time.

The other thing is poor alignment (especially toe settings) which cause the tyres to fight each other constantly. It can be a very small difference, almost imperceptible but still accelerate the wear.

10k miles is very short for a tyre.

Often you can tell a lot from the tyre temperature after a drive: if they're getting very warm, it can indicate problems, e.g. if one axle has much warmer tyres than the other (hard to give an objective standard on that, though, so many factors)

A friend got hit by this as well and since readjusting his driving style (read: not flying through corners for the fun of it) he gets more (but still not equal) miles on his EV's tires before he needs new ones.

If driving Tesla, you can reduce the regenerative breaking from Maximum setting to Medium.

this will reduce regeneration and will increase the "breaking distance" when you just let go of accelerator pedal.

but it will increase your tire life significantly.

also make sure to buy the "commuter tire" models - tires with high mileage warranty (50k miles+) and harder compound. Even if it wears out faster, tire manufacturer's warranty will make up for it by giving you discount for the replacement tire purchase

I assure you. If your EV tires are only lasting 10K miles you have one of the following cases:

- You are driving VERY aggressively

- Your car has an alignment issue or some sort of torque vectoring problem

- Your tires are absolute shit

They're not low friction tires, they're low rolling resistance tires.

Friction relates to the grip, rolling resistance relates to the heat generated by the deformation of the tire. A less compliant, often narrower tire may wear faster than a more compliant wider one.

It depends.

"Tyres account for about a fifth of the energy required to power a car. They provide friction, so that the vehicle can grip the road, but some of the power supplied to the tyres is then lost as heat. Indeed, Michelin, a French tyremaker, estimates that this “rolling resistance” accounts for 4% of the world's carbon-dioxide emissions. Tyre designers have therefore sought to improve fuel economy by reducing rolling resistance. However, this not only reduces a tyre's ability to grip, making drivers take corners sideways, it also wears out the tyres more rapidly."

from: https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2009/12/02/ro...

without login: https://archive.is/TiIUk

What this means is that you can push tires to the absolute limit and not chirp them (which, is best for traction anyways) which absolutely roasts them. Most people associate chirp = too fast, but with EVs you can never hear a chirp even when you stomp on the accelerator so they might think everything is ok.

Nobody should be shredding a set of tires in 10k miles in any EV unless they’re super low tread wear (poor tire choice, hard to do that bad), there’s an issue with the car suspension, or they’re just being idiots.

The Model X's curb weight ranges from 5,148 lbs to 5,531 lbs, while the Telluride's curb weight falls between 4,112 lbs and 4,482 lbs.

Performance oriented EVs, just like performance oriented ICE cars, are going to have softer, stickier tires that wear faster.

Of course if you're commuting 2 hours every day, things will be different. But for us, it's been great.

EV is not for everyone, but those Rivian are nice though. =3

Only laws (accommodate EVs and/or WFH) or spending time sitting at a gas station will help me here. No landlord is interested in accommodating an EV unless it's a net benefit to them (and thus a net negative to me, who already spends 40% income just to have a place to work.)

Credits are indeed a scam but they are not a mandatory component of a carbon externality tax.

It is cleaner from a sulfur content and long-term carbon cycle perspective, but is very similar to regular fuels.

The dilemma is whether B100 it more difficult to scale than trying to retool our entire global energy infrastructure with finite rare earth metals. =3

Changes on this scale take time. But to make the islands much less dependent on fossil fuels, a two-pronged strategy is in play. Reduce fossil fuel generation, but also reduce the dependence on fossil fuel in transport.

As a long-term strategy, reducing the cost of importing all that fuel, over vast distances, seems to be a huge win for the islands. In every way (politically, economically, socially, environmentally) generating their own energy is a win.

Pollution and environmental destruction are big problems, but there are no remotely likely scenarios where the Earth "is wrecked by pollution" and a HN reader would need to question the viability of remaining on the planet.

Annoyingly, plugs are not perfect either: after a tyre has been plugged I’m putting air in it like every 2 months, so anecdotally I guess the plugs leak really slowly.

Again, that's your personal choice.

We've got off road and on road tyres we still use with four to five tyre plugs in them that have lasted a few years since their last puncture.

I'm in non urban Australia and have cars actively used with > 500,000 km on the clock. We were raised to maintain gear; be it cars, trucks, aircraft, excavators, bob cats, etc.