How to make an EV tire that won’t pollute the environment
How to make an EV tire that won’t pollute the environment
EV tires are a source of pollution.
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It's going to be all about the price.
My hybrid recommends "eco" style tires to get the best gas mileage. Those were $100 more, per tire, than the standard low-profiles. At the time, I commuted about 110 miles/day, so tires typically only lasted me about a year before they were either officially worn out or too worn to be safe to drive in winter.
I only noticed about a 1-2 MPG loss with the "standard" tires versus the "eco" ones that came with it. Over the course of a year, I doubt that 1-2 MPG added up to the $400 difference.
So, these cleaner tires are a good thing, assuming they're not more expensive than current-style tires. Depending on use-case, 35% longer life (if that holds true) may be able to tempt price-conscious buyers.
All that said, I could definitely see these becoming the "factory" tires for new EVs, though.
Yeah, that closing point is likely gonna be screwed by economies of scale. You need more adoption for the price to fall and with the price high you won't see that large adoption. So, I suspect we won't see those prices until many more EVs are on the road.
Price is definitely important, but so is traction. If stopping distance increases because eco materials grip less, that would be a concern.
My criteria are performance results, wear rating, and price.
I wouldn't think stopping distance would be noticeably impacted by less rolling resistance. My original "eco" tires stopped the same as the standard ones. They're "eco" because they have less rolling resistance and are slightly lighter.
Plus, with ABS, you're not likely to lock the wheels up such that the decreased resistance would be significant.
On slick roads would be my only concern, but a good and season appropriate tread should mitigate that.
In a car with ABS, two sets of tyres with different grip will have a different point at which tyres lock up, with grippier tires locking up later and ABS letting the brakes bite harder before acting.
Now a harder question is whether a tyre with less rolling resistance will be less grippy. All things equal, yes, it will. Tyres grip by deforming and creating friction in the contact patch, and the point of these tyres is to reduce friction.
To make up for this, manufacturers use clever designs (e.g. where tyres can deform more under certain conditions) so that they can retain characteristics similar to tyres with more rolling resistance. Of course, everything in engineering is a compromise, which means that A) these tyres are more expensive because of the additional complexity and B) the design and materials science can only go so far and they have indeed slightly less grip; otherwise all the tyres would be like this.
As an anecdote, Toyota sold the GR86 with Michelin Energy Saver tyres fitted as standard (in Europe at least) for "grip" reasons: they allowed the car to drift at really low speeds (some car journalists commented that it was remarkably easy to take roundabouts sideways at legal speeds).
Please do the rest of the math and put a number on the actual comparison.
28,600mi/yr (wow, BTW) - 110mi x 260 working days a year
What were the actual mpg's and costs for the eco and regular tires?
And how heavy is your hybrid?
It’s going to be all about the price.
EV or not, price the pollution into the cost of buying the tire. Then the economics of a non-polluting tire would be the primary driver for adoption because they would be cheaper than polluting tires.
Thus preventing those who can't afford it from getting to work.