It gets studied. EVs are often heavier, which is worse for tire wear, but use regenerative braking, which is better for brake dust.
Overall, EVs are likely a net win on the combination of these two things, and a big win on exhaust emissions, but it would be nice if we could shift to lighter and smaller vehicles and increase the mix of non-cars such as e-bikes and mass transit.
Plug-in hybrids are a wonderful middle point on the Pareto frontier.
Wikipedia lists the 3rd-gen Prius Prime at roughly 3,500 pounds curb weight, and the Tesla Model Y at 4,100-4,600 pounds, I assume depending on the battery it's equipped with.
The Prius Prime has 40+ miles of all-electric range, and it can reach highway speeds with the gas engine off. So your day-to-day driving is all electric, then you still have an engine for harsh winter days, power outages, and you have 600 miles EPA range on gas for sudden road trips.
People are really sleeping on hybrids. Even a used non-plug-in Prius will get 50 city and 50 highway MPG. No gas sedan can do that.
PHEVs are a very interim solution. There are some advantages while range anxiety is an issue.
Yes, EVs have a weight penalty of ~250-500kg of battery currently.
Battery technology is rapidly advancing, when Na-ion batteries are introduced more widely, the whole range anxiety issue will become moot, because a recharge will take as long as refueling an ICE vehicle.
The weight difference will also start to reduce, both due to newer batteries, but also moving to lighter weight construction and increased use of alternatives to steel.
Arguing for ICE technology in 2025 is like Blackberry/Nokia users complaining about the loss of keyboards & T9 texting.
I looked into PHEVs on my last vehicle shopping go-round, since few pure EVs met my cargo size requirements (stroller/baby life is a whole thing).
Ultimately, it was way more worth it to go all the way up to an F150 Lightning than to go with a good PHEV, partly due to up-front cost, but mostly due to ongoing cost: I will need to change the oil on the electric motors maybe every 150,000miles, and I never need an emissions test again. PHEVs require keeping the gas engine up, and getting it emissions-tested.
A whole category of cost just straight-up disappeared, for cheaper than I could get a RAV4 Prime too.
This will be met with consternation, not appreciation. The people who comment about brake dust in EV topics are the people who complain about birds when talking about windmills.
We know it is disingenuous because no one cares about this when discussing overweight trucks and SUVs. Good news about a reduction in pollution from EVs? Can't have that. It's like the "At what price" meme around headlines about China.
Going forward, I will downvote any comment about "brake pollution" and "tire pollution" that does not begin with - specifically - "This is a bigger issue for large, gas-powered trucks and SUVs", and invite you all to do so to. The association of these shitty comments with EV topics is as organic as lighter fluid.
The theory is that they're heavier so more brake dust ... but that is offset to a degree by regen braking (which hybrids have too). It's a silly argument though. Brake dust is definitely bad but the idea of keeping ICE cars to minimize brake dust doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
Please don't downvote comments because you don't agree with the argument. Downvotes should be for comments that add little to the discussion.
I agree that discussing weight with regard to EVs, without acknowledging that (in the US) the fashion is for big heavy ICE cars is just as polluting is disingenuous.
That said, outside the US the trend is for smaller cars, and equally the weight of a small EV is not hugely dissimilar to a common ICE car.
Frankly I'm not sure there's a whole lot to say about tire dust- cars need tires. EVs generate less brake dust. If there's a tire dust discussion to be had, then that discussion is independent of the vehicle fuel source.
And wouldn't you say that when a comment is made in bad faith, or misrepresents (deliberately or not) a major component of its argument, that it adds little to the discussion?
It's all well and good to have high-minded ideals of pure intellectual discussion, but in the real world, there are many people who are coming into the comments with a strong political agenda in mind, and are both willing and able to make disingenuous and bad-faith comments to support that agenda.
Presenting the increased tire dust of heavier vehicles as being an exclusive property of EVs—a bright-line differentiator between them and ICE cars—is disingenuous and misrepresents the facts. I think it's reasonable to say that makes it "add little to the discussion".
I understand that it can feel like you're having to make the same point over and over (I certainly feel like that sometimes) but personally I'm more inclined to give the person the benefit of the doubt when it comes to good faith.
Out in the world there are common misconceptions which are propagated by vested interests and believed by many at first glance.
Having the opportunity to see those arguments, and rebuff them , (over and over again) is key to balancing the public discourse.
I agree, some argue in bad faith, that's going to be true in some cases. But I think most times it's honest misconceptions.
As a personal policy, that can work: you can always choose which conversations to engage in and which to ignore.
As a site policy, it cannot. If you demand that everyone coming there in good faith treat everyone else as also operating in good faith, even when they open with arguments that are very common when sealioning people, you are telling every troll, every bad actor, everyone paid by a massive corporation or a foreign government to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about particular political or economic positions that this site is ripe for their use.
I've seen far too many people even on here "just asking questions", or using the Gish Gallop, or other techniques of bad faith debate, to believe that it can possibly be a good idea to treat everyone as if they are good-faith rational actors seeking open debate for the sake of finding the truth.
If you're still not convinced, do some research on Brandolini's Law [0], also known as the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle. It really does take massively more effort to refute bullshit with truth than it does to spin bullshit everywhere.
That literally makes no sense. There’s a point on the accelerator pedal curve where you are coasting (between it applying power or applying regen), you get used to staying around that position pretty quickly because you stop short of where you are aiming to stop otherwise. You basically only back off past that point and into regen when you would be braking in an ICE car, so there is really no difference.
You don't stay at the zero point. It's an impossibly small target. This is not news to anyone who drives an EV and keeps an eye on the readout showing current power usage/regen.
I don't think it's impossibly small. Maybe it depends on your software - you don't need to have a completely linear response across the full range of the pedal.
Braking from regen or braking from a brake pad has the same net impact on tire wear. EVs can coast too and don’t apply full regen the moment you apply brakes. Some even have brake coach alerts to get you to gradually apply the brakes to maximize energy return.
EVs could coast if a manufacturer chose to make one that allowed that without shifting into neutral. In practice, when letting off the accelerator, existing EVs will instead regen brake.
The default setting just moves the coast point to a slightly depressed accelerator. This is because EVs typically have lower drag, so this behavior mimics a higher drag vehicle. If you use the accelerator to achieve the desired speed, you will coast when possible. You can also monitor the display to see the coast point. My 2013 plug in hybrid only supports this style of operation.
Modern EVs have easy adjustment for this. The Hyundai/Kia EVs for example have shift style paddles for adjusting this on the fly which includes a mode for regen only when depressing the break pedal.
The Hyundai/Kia EVs do not have a mode that only regens when pressing the brake. The best you can do is limit the car to 2kW of regen braking when not touching the accelerator. You can't disable it entirely.
It's true though that using this mode will extend the life of your tires.
It hovers depending on how my foot modulates the speed. I don't want or need "exactly zero power readout", I only need to reach my target speed at my target spot on the highway, without having to action the physical brakes at any time.
Whether that is more or less efficient than a zero-power coast followed by some kind of braking exactly at the end... I assume the difference is so tiny that it makes no difference.
The difference is tiny from an energy efficiency perspective. But we're discussing tire wear, and the periodic regen followed by power that a human foot gives because it can't perfectly match the car's PID loop, wears the tires a bit each time. Which adds up over ten thousand miles.
Indeed it adds up, over ten thousand kilometers, to a lot less wear than the equivalent coast-then-hit-the-brakes in an ICE. If I follow your reasoning correctly.
What? No. We definitely didn't follow one another. I'm confused where we misunderstood one another now.
For the purposes of tire wear, applying regen braking in a car is the same as applying brake pads. Generating 5kW of electricity of 10 seconds vs generating 5kW of heat for 10 seconds, same same.
Let's say you're on the highway driving in an EV. You have cruise control on. You go down a hill. The EV's cruise control applies regen braking down the hill, using the tires to slow you to your desired speed.
Let's say you do the same in an ICE vehicle. You will coast down the hill, gathering speed. Cruise control in an ICE vehicle generally will not brake for you. So more of your energy from the hill gets removed as air resistance. When you slow due to air resistance it does not wear the tires.
The same logic applies each time you push the gas pedal slightly harder than you needed to and then back off.
"applying regen braking in a car is the same as applying brake pads"
That's an assumption I disagree with. Brake pads will always be less smooth than engine braking. For the same braking action, I assume more brake dust and slightly higher tire wear due to brakes not able to provide fine speed adjustment.
The down-the-hill scenario is interesting, it brings new comparisons: is there more tire wear from maintaining a chosen speed, vs letting the car overspeed and then braking? How does air resistance contribute in each case?
I maintain my earlier opinion that the differences between all these scenarios are minimal and can be ignored. But if you have some physical model that helps calculate these scenarios, it could be fun to play around with.
The tires and their dust don't care whether you're braking by regen or friction. The reason there's more dust is from the increased weight of the EV not because of regen braking. You can coast in EV as well, that is not exclusive to ICE.
> The tires and their dust don't care whether you're braking by regen or friction.
I'm aware. The point I'm making is that EVs apply more braking than ICE vehicles do, due to the specifics of the implementation of regen braking that all manufacturers have chosen.
> You can coast in EV as well
Not without literally putting it in neutral. If you just take your foot off the accelerator, any modern EV will apply some amount of regenerative braking. It's not really possible to hold the accelerator pedal at the exact position where you are not applying motor power but also have 0kW of regen braking, certainly for any extended period of time.
If your point is that someone could make an EV to which regen braking contributes no more to tire wear than an ICE vehicle, you're correct. Unfortunately, no such EVs are currently manufactured. Even the ones that allow you to "turn off" regen braking will generally apply 1-2kW of regen if your foot is off the accelerator.
> I'm aware. The point I'm making is that EVs apply more braking than ICE vehicles do, due to the specifics of the implementation of regen braking that all manufacturers have chosen
Hyundai and Kia EVs have a 5 level setting for what happens when you lift up on the accelerator, either partially or fully.
At level 0 the regeneration is so low that I don't notice a difference between that and being in neutral. It slows down way less than an ICE does when not in neutral.
> If you just take your foot off the accelerator, any modern EV will apply some amount of regenerative braking. It's not really possible to hold the accelerator pedal at the exact position where you are not applying motor power but also have 0kW of regen braking, certainly for any extended period of time.
Tire wear is not a linear function of acceleration. Is there any reason to believe that variations from not being able to hold your foot perfectly steady, assuming you aren't have spasms, will be big enough and/or last long enough to make a non-trivial difference?
The responses tend to be either "actually regen braking wears tires just as much as using brake rotors" by people who didn't actually read, or "surely manufacturers wouldn't do that, it doesn't match the mental model in my head" by people who've never paid close attention to the power readouts while driving an EV.
Your own response was "actually one manufacturer does have a setting that will avoid the effect if someone sets it, therefore the whole concept must be wrong".
The amount of braking force needed to take a car of X weight from Y miles per hour to zero in a given amount of time is the same whether by friction brakes or regen brakes.
You can reduce the total braking force needed by extending the time, in which case aerodynamic forces and rolling resistance will contribute some more to the reduction in speed.
In an EV with one-pedal driving you can still stop quickly or slowly. In an ICE car you can stop slowly with more coasting or quickly with more braking force.
I don't see how the drivetrain is going to make a difference to the amount of braking needed to stop and thus force exerted on the tire. The added weight of most EVs would be the larger factor.
But ICE vehicles can be in engine breaking mode. You pretty much never "coast" (e.g. put the vehicle in neutral or hold the clutch in). I get what you're saying but it feels like it's way in the margin if an effect at all. Do you have some reference? People keep talking about tire wear but my model 3 tires (which are relatively high performance soft tires) aren't wearing any faster than the wear I used to get on my Subaru before. I just don't drive aggressively. Flooring the accelerator must be the big difference. I don't think the weight difference is that large, certainly compared to trucks.
The amount of engine braking applied by an automatic transmission ICE vehicle when you take your foot off the gas is an order of magnitude less than the regen braking applied when you take your foot off the accelerator on your Model 3.
First off, my Renault Megane e-Tech has paddles that allow me to change the regen strength on the fly. I use it actively when driving.
But anyway, I find I drive differently with an EV. I don't let off the throttle unless I want to slow down. If I want to coast, I just reduce my throttle input to where its coasting.
I'll have to double-check, but as I recall it the lowest setting in Sports mode was off. But maybe just very, very low.
In any case, what's the problem with having it very, very low vs off? Like, what do you really need coasting for? Not something I've felt I've been missing.
Adaptive cruise control lets you set a speed, usually the speed limit, and then you just have to steer.
In a gas car that means the car is using the brakes and gas engine (obviously) but it’s a jarring experience compared to a BEV or hybrid. The regenerative braking and smooth acceleration are much more pleasant.
I tend to agree with your overall point, but if we're talking about a 1-2 kW of "standby" regen, surely the rolling resistance of any kind of vehicle is in the same ballpark anyway (source: it takes multiple people to push a broken down car).
The bearings and whatnot that cause rolling resistance on an ordinary car also exist in EVs; this is 1-2kW on top of that, when the car is in Drive. Furthermore, it's common to use one pedal driving- it's generally much more than 1-2kW.
The thing that gets me is the assumption that we're not complex creatures who might each value different things at different times and in different contexts.
As for me, sometimes I code because I want something to do a specific thing, and I honestly couldn't be bothered to care how it happens.
Sometimes I code because I want something to work a very specific way or to learn how to make something work better, and I want to have my brain so deep in a chunk of code I can see it in my sleep.
Sometimes the creative expression is in the 'what' - one of my little startup tasks these days is experimenting with UI designs for helping a human get a task done as efficiently as possible. Sometimes it's in the 'how' - implementing the backend to that thing to be ridiculously fast and efficient. Sometimes it's both and sometimes it's neither!
A beautiful thing about code is that it can be a tool and it can be an expressive medium that scratches our urge to create and dive into things, or it can be both at the same time. Code is the most flexible substance on earth, for good and for creating incredible messes.
I'll argue the the LLM can be a great ally when "I want to have my brain so deep in a chunk of code I can see it in my sleep" because it can help you see the whole picture.
This is an interesting discussion to me - I have a cordless vacuum that works well and a roborock combo vac/mop that works well. Actually, I'm lying, I have two cordless vacuums because the GGP's observation rings true to me and I got a second one for free and held on to it. :-)
Dyson cordless vac, older (v8 ultimate). Have had to replace battery once and broken trigger. Continues to be a workhorse.
Roborock s5v: I have it run 2x / day on weekdays, once in the morning after breakfast when we're taking the kids to school (vac kitchen only), and once after bedtime (vac + mop entire area). It does a great job of generally keeping things clean. Not perfect, but the overall dirt level stays low.
The cordless manual vac is really useful for "oh bleep, 8yo just spilled MORE stuff on the ground". I keep it next to the dining and kitchen area. It's not super aesthetic having it hanging on the wall in a visible location but I have engineer-itis and I value the convenience over the illusion that we don't own a vacuum. :) I approximately never use the robovac as an on-demand vacuum unless it's to run an extra pass when we're leaving home on a weekend and have left crumbs from a meal.
For us, substantially upping the frequency of vacuuming, even if it's not quite as deep, has made a big difference, and it's basically no extra burden to have the robovac run frequently after programming it.
It is but we're not there yet. You can use a refinement style system like Verus in which your spec is a very high level statement of system behavior, like "this system provides the properties that paxos is supposed to guarantee"(1), and then be guaranteed that the things that implement it are preserving that spec.
But this is still double black diamond expert territory - it remains a challenging thing to identify ways to state and refine those properties to enable the proof. But it's getting easier by the year and the LLMs are getting more useful as part of it.
(1) You would have to state the consistency and conditional liveness properties directly, of course, as Verus doesn't understand "what paxos does". That would look like TLA+-style statements, "at some time in the future, a command submitted now will be executed, etc."
We do the same in Pennsylvania - I have about 10 kwh of battery. I can't put solar on my roof, so I only have a very small 800w array on top of my garden. I run it as an off grid system that can recharge from shore power, so I have to use all of the energy it produces or it goes to waste. But it saves some money and is enough battery to let me time shift to take advantage of time of use power rates, and it gives me very good run time for refrigerators and internet during outages.
There seem to be a few sweet spots in solar - a tiny array that you use all of without having to grid tie it is really cost effective. (The cost of grid tied solar adds 5-10k to the system cost). Otherwise go big. :)
There's one called "nexus" that finds sparse clusters of primes of longer length than the ones in riecoin but where there can be a slightly larger inter-prime gap.
(It turns out to be a bad idea to use a mathematically complicated proof of work function, because it means someone like me will come along with some friends who are GPU programming experts and mine your coin better than the developer can.)
I wrote a small paper about developing an optimized technique for mining cuckoo cycle; I believe that technique still forms the basis of how the high performance miners for it work:
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dga/crypto/cuckoo/analysis.pdf
(The funny part of that monero one, of course is that the publicly released miner at the time had been artificially slowed down by the bitmonero devs so they could pre-mine it)
I agree with you, but I do think we have a bit of a problem in which an open source creator makes something and then suddenly finds themselves accidentally having created a load-bearing component that is not only used by a lot of people and companies, but where people are demanding that bugs be fixed, etc., and we lack great models for helping transition it from "I do this for fun, might fix the bug if I ever feel like it" to " I respect that this has become a critical dependency and we will find a way to make it someone's job to make it more like a product".
I gather that the open source maintainers who have found themselves in this situation sometimes get very unhappy about it, and I can see why -- it's not like they woke up one day and suddenly had a critical component on their hands, it kind of evolved over time and after a while they're like "uhoh, I don't think this is what I signed up for"
In that case the maintainer needs to have some self-restraint and accept that they don't owe them anything. If somebody depends on the maintainer's package for a critical component then they should consider paying them and possibly drawing up an explicit contract. That's what we did at my work for a critical open source component, where we paid the maintainer to add several features we needed.
I don’t think the added idea of “I pay good money for my GitHub subscription and some of that pays you, you are obligated to support me!” would help here.
I agree - but maybe if there were easy ways to opt-in to "hey I want to actually get paid for this thing and in return I'm going to spend more time on it" it might be a good thing. I'm not sure the model in this post is the right way -- I like what Filippo Valsorda has done in creating a small company of developers who do contracted OSS crypto software maintenance. But complicated.
I think expecting to get paid to fix bugs, add features, etc. to one’s open source code is much more reasonable and there should be marketplace infrastructure that makes this much easier to do (compared to the current system where developers have to apply for corporate grants for long running projects).
I've killed a bunch of stuff lately mixing some wool socks in with towels. Oops. The towels stay wet long enough that the wool got overheated, and then my 8 year old spent the next week yelling at me for ruining his socks. :)
As I understand it, many people prefer the heat pump dryers because they are easier to install. Most are 110v and don't exhaust moisture, so you can just shove one in a closet if it has sufficient electricity. You do need to remove the water reservoir and pour it down a drain after every few loads of laundry.
Oh, that part of the installation is easy, it's literally just physically getting a large, heavy rectangular cuboid navigated through my basement to the laundry room. The last time I brought one in I put a hole in the door (by accident).
I have a little fanless mini PC that runs various stuff around my house, including homeassistant. The case is basically a big heat sink.
It started crashing during backups.
The solution was to stick a fan on it. :( This is literally a box _designed to not need a fan_. And yet. It now has a fan and has been stable for months. And it's not even in a closet - it's wall-mounted with lots of available air around it.
I'm guessing it's the HDD that's failing. Had such mysterious failures with my NVR (the Cloud Key thingie) from UniFi. Turns out, HDDs don't like operating in 60+ degree Celsius heat all the time - but SSDs don't mind, so fortunately the fix was just to swap the drive for a solid state one.
I think it was the DRAM on mine, oddly. It already uses an nvme ssd. Could have been the CPU, of course - the error was manifesting as memory corruption but that could well have been happening during read or write.
Overall, EVs are likely a net win on the combination of these two things, and a big win on exhaust emissions, but it would be nice if we could shift to lighter and smaller vehicles and increase the mix of non-cars such as e-bikes and mass transit.
Source: https://www.eiturbanmobility.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/4...
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