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Scientists: Electric Vehicles Produce As Many Toxins As Dirty Diesels (dailymail.co.uk)
An anonymous reader writes: Thanks to ongoing efforts to reduce engine emissions, nowadays only 10% to 15% of particulate emissions from traffic are coming from vehicles' tailpipes. The remainder originates in tire, road surface and brake wear. A study by Victor Timmers and Peter Achten published in Atmospheric Environment has now found that the extra weight of electric vehicles causes non-tailpipe emissions to increase by about as much as the omission of the internal combustion engine saves. Atmospheric particulates have been shown to cause cancer, cardiovascular disease and respiratory diseases and are widely considered as the most harmful form of air pollution. Achten said, "We found that non-exhaust emissions, from brakes, tires and the road, are far larger than exhaust emissions in all modern cars. These are more toxic than emissions from modern engines so they are likely to be key factors in the extra heart attacks, strokes and asthma attacks seen when air pollution levels surge." The study shows that non-exhaust emissions a vehicle produces is directly related to its weight. Scientists found that electric and eco-friendly vehicles weighed around 24 percent more than conventional vehicles, which in turn contributes to more wear on the tires.
Can a legitimate news outlet tell us if this is a REAL concern?
the Petroleum Institute and Oil Producing Export Countries.
When you use the brakes in an EV the brake pads generally aren't used, instead the motor is used as a generator converting kinetic energy into stored power. I don't see this mentioned in the abstract, are the authors really not including this?
Sounds pretty sciency
Who knew that stuff was so deadly toxic? Really?
First off, electric cars use their brake pads less, not more. Regenerative brakes do most of the work, and the brakes last 2-3x longer than a regular gasoline car. Tire do last a little less long, but most of those are big particles, and I have never heard of tire dust being considered a major health risk.
Sounds like a hatchet job...
According to this, we should obviously ban trucks from city streets. How many cars would it take to equal the weight of an 18-wheel rolling warehouse loaded with plates, cutlery and mini-fridges for Walmart?
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
And they also cut down on brake dust by using regenerative braking as much as possible.
I think there's some room to move here, to ensure EVs are better on particulates.
Maybe we have to discourage the purchase of 6,000lb Teslas and instead encourage the purchase of 3600lb LEAFs and Bolts.
This thing that particulates being widely considered the most harmful form of air pollution is also new to me. They're a serious problem for sure, but I think other trace emissions like NOx are still quite significant. And that's all ignoring CO2.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Not only that, the disc pads on a vehicle are very small compared with the fuel burned. Imagine a 0.1kg brake pad that lasts 200,000km verses 160'000 Litres of fuel burned over the same distance.
Obviously driving has environmental impacts. This is not news. Bringing this up reminds me of this essay:
http://www.abstractconcretewor...
But when comparing the two classes of vehicles, the entire supply chain needs to be considered. You can use existing electrical infrastructure (and possibly renewable energy) to charge an electric vehicle. For a traditionally-fueled vehicle, you need to consider exploration, extraction, refinery, transportation, and disaster mitigation.
I think the lesser of two evils is clear.
Answer is one bite at a time.
Gotta start somewhere. Sorry petroleum industry, but it looks like the focus of your products will have to change. Trying to forestall it with claims so transparent even auto enthusiasts are embarrassed by them won't help.
Whatever remaining aspects of pollution from electric cars can be addressed in-time.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I have first-hand knowledge that pads aren't used much with an electric car, and second-hand knowledge that that's how it works with a hybrid, as well -- my co-worker with the hybrid said the people at the garage marvelled at the lack of brake pad residue.
Hydrogen is not a better way to store energy for electric drive cars. You need to do more research if you really believe this.
My boss had to replace the front brake pads on his Prius after ten years and 120,000 miles. The rear ones are still good.
Doing a two minute google search turns out the authors are an undergrad university student (according to LinkedIn) without a research background (google scholar turns empty), and a researcher with a company that develops combustion engines
Not to pull an ad-hominem here, but I'd take the paper with lots of grains of salt.
As a savvy owner of a Prius c hybrid, I think I have some insight into this... Basically, the brake pads *are* used quite a lot by aggressive drivers who tailgate and have to brake hard when the car in front of them slows down. People who drive with a proper following distance ahead of them will rarely have to use the disc brakes.
Hybrid vehicles (and EVs, probably) have smaller brake pads than similarly sized conventional vehicles (though the actual stopping power of the disc brakes in an emergency is just as good as regular cars). The brake pads are about half as thick on my Prius c as the brake pads on my Honda Civic. That's because the manufacturer expects you to use them less often. I'm sure there are some insane drivers out there who can burn through the brake pads on a vehicle like mine in well under 50,000 miles, but those same people would burn through the brakes on any vehicle just as quickly.
I've learned to "feel" the difference between the cut-over between regenerative braking and the disc brakes. The disc brakes slow you down WAY faster. There's not a discrete and obvious jolt when you gradually depress the brake pedal; it's incredibly smooth; but to use an analogy, as long as I'm slowing down at about the same rate as a truck can slow down when using the jake brake (engine braking - that loud "farting" sound that large trucks sometimes make when slowing down), I'm using the regenerative braking system only. If I'm slowing down much faster than that, the disc brakes are being engaged (the brakes and the regenerative braking can be active at the same time, unless you are braking at what would be considered "emergency" speeds, in which case the regenerative braking system disengages, perhaps because it can't handle that amount of torque or current).
As for the article itself: 24 percent?! That's total bullshit.
The Prius c is literally a Yaris Hybrid (it's marketed as such in some parts of the world). It's the Toyota Yaris -- a compact car -- with the Toyota Hybrid Synergy Drive in it. So, it's a Yaris, *plus* the weight of the HSD.
The curb weight of the Yaris is 2335 pounds. The curb weight of the Prius c is 2500 pounds. That's only a 7.066% increase. That's a far, far cry from the 24% the article cites.
OK, you say, let's look at *electric* vehicles specifically, not just hybrids. Because hybrids don't have to lug around 500 pounds of lithium-ion batteries. Hybrid batteries tend to weigh under 200 pounds, with the smallest hybrids' ~1 kWh batteries weighing less than 100 pounds.
Let's take the Chevy Spark. The conventional Spark weighs in around 2270 pounds. The EV? 3000 pounds. That's a 32% increase for basically the same passenger and cargo volume. Fair enough. But 3000 pounds isn't out of this world, and is in the ballpark of many upscale compact cars like the (conventional) Honda Civic.
Another example. The 2016 Nissan Leaf weighs around 3150 pounds. I did some research to try and find a conventional vehicle with similar interior measurements (headroom, cargo space, etc.) and I came up with this: The 2016 Honda Civic EX has a total (usable) interior volume of 110.1 cubic feet with a curb weight of 2799 pounds. The 2016 Nissan Leaf has an interior volume of 116 cubic feet. So for 6 more cubic feet of interior (5.4% more), the vehicle weighs 351 pounds (25.4%) more.
Based on these limited comparisons, it seems like the article's claim about the increased weight of electric vehicles is factual. However, it is absolutely not valid to make the leap to saying that plug-in hybrids or conventional hybrids are anywhere near as bad in terms of added weight.
What I'm not convinced of, however, is the severity and environmental impact of tire and brake wear, regardless of vehicle weight. EVs and hybrids also run with low rolling resistance tires, which should reduce the amount of tire "stuff" in the air, in any case. Did they take that into account?
However, switching out a gasoline engine for a TDI diesel engine adds about 300 pounds to a sedan-
1) Not all energy comes from burning fossil fuels. Nuclear, Wind, Solar and Hydro could also be used to power an electric car. That alone should make it comparatively cleaner.
2) As for efficiency goes, in a car about only 15% of the fuel energy is converted into motion. The rest is wasted as heat. Power plants are more efficient at using that heat and turn it into electricity, making again electric cars get more efficiency per unit of fuel burned.
3) Gasoline must be carried to gas stations. Think of it as a hidden energy cost: The cost of running you car = the fuel it burns + the energy it took to get it to your car.
On the opposite side, batteries are not as efficient storing energy as gasoline is, and there is also loss of power on transmission lines. I haven't done the math myself, but overall electric should be more efficient than gasoline cars.
They are 24% heavier than the same-sized ICE vehicle.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
What's a reasonable time? It takes only a few seconds after arriving home to plug in an electric car.
For how many apartment dwellers is that true for again?
Oh what's that, you were only considering people who had homes instead of everyone? A replacement transportation system works only if it works for EVERYONE.
Also that 30 minutes is about ten hours if you increased the number of Teslas on the road substantially. A 30 minute fill-up time, even if reduced to fifteen minutes, simple cannot scale to ALL CARS.
If you take ten seconds to actually think about the implications of what happens when ALL CARS are electric the mass-market solution is dictated to you and requires no skill to predict.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
http://31.184.194.81/10.1016/j... = Sci-hub link.
It's absolute garbage "research". Speculation layered upon speculation. It has the quality of a rant.
Victor Timmers is still getting his BEng. He was a research intern. Yay!
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vi...
Peter A.J. Achten is a hydraulics engineer for INNAS.
http://www.innas.com/
Some gems from their trash:
"Despite the lack of direct research, there is significant indirect evidence..."
"Many studies and emission inventories suggest..."
But here's my favorite:
"It can be hypothesised that..."
WTF?
4) Scrub Towers can be as tall, heavy, and complex as necessary to meet emissions guidelines since they're not driving down the road.
Since line loss is estimated 8%-15% and AC-to-DC happens at a charge station and (if it's like my PC power brick) should be 97% efficient. Battery efficiency is a measure of storage, so it's uninteresting unless considering vehicle weight. There is some loss in charging, but I'd imagine it compares to the evaporation losses in gasoline. This about-20% loss (slightly-more weight-considered) turns-out to be much less loss than gasoline's 85% loss in just its final step. And considering the electric motor doesn't need to "keep up" when not providing force (instant torque), it's even better.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
Why is The Daily Mail, a lowest-rung tabloid, being linked on the /. main page?
The paper itself is so full of faults that I would have to write more than the paper's authors in order to describe them all. Others in this thread are doing that. I will take the time to make two counter-points, though:
(1) Heavier cars, eh? You mean, like SUVs? The logical conclusion here is to promote sub-compact cars, public transport, and cargo transport by rail, rather than big-rig transport, of goods around the country. I don't think Rupert Murdoch would be in favor any of this, considering his investments in the fossil fuel industry.
(2) Electric cars rely primarily on regenerative braking. Essentially, the motors work in reverse to produce electricity when reducing speed (momentum, but ultimately kinetic energy) of the car – transforming that back into potential energy that is stored in the car's batteries. These motors are brush-less, meaning that there is no frictional contact, and thus no particulates produced. Compare this to regular car brakes, which are entirely frictional and heat-dissipating. Do we still use asbestos in car brake drums? Regardless, 'regular' brakes are two surfaces grinding against each other, creating micro-particulates. Drum brakes are going away, so it's all 4-wheel disk brakes. Usually made of metal.
But on my high-end sports car, which requires ceramic brake pads, braking creates micro-particulates of ceramic materials that are not soluble in the human lung, which is the kind of thing that causes mesothelioma (blacklung, asbestosis, silicosis, and the many others yet to be named... until enough people exhibit direct signs of a specific material causing the mesothelioma). It's not hard to know which materials will be in this class, but my managers tended to 'shush' me when I brought up the topic years ago – but it has since-then become a major area of research. It is not hard to create a definitive list, but NSF only likes to fund incremental research, rather than fundamentals-based studies. Thus, I will simply keep my mouth (and my windows) shut.
After all when someone is done with a Prius they just dump it in a landfill, where all the nickel in the battery will eventually leak out and contaminate ground water. What? No one does this?
Well then, when someone is done with a Prius they BURN it! And all that nickel goes into the air! Wait, no one does that either.
What does happen to a Prius once it exceeds its service life? People sell it to scrap dealers, who take the batteries out and ship them to reclaiming facilities where the valuable nickel is recovered and reused.
Just more anti-environmental BS. Nothing to see here.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Articles like this are almost as popular with news sites as "chocolate/beer/wine/cheese/bacon cures cancer!". From what I can tell, the publication was written by a summer intern who is about a junior in college, by reviewing other publications and making some guesses from the data contained therein. It's a good thought piece, i.e. "Hey guys, there's a lot of stuff that we haven't really done much to improve yet, maybe we should look into that." The publication doesn't make an argument that "electric cars are evil." It doesn't even have any real data of its own. And well over half of the particulate matter that they attribute is just stuff that was lying on the ground and the cars kicked up into the air; and because they claim that an EV is 24% heavier, it will kick up 24% more PM in its wake, which is probably not true. I'd be willing to bet that even if EVs average 24% heavier, they are probably not also 24% larger and 24% less aerodynamic; and the size and shape of the vehicle matter at least as much as the weight in creating a wake, if not more.
On top of that, I don't know that reduction of particulate matter has ever been a huge concern for the EV market. Generally, the concerns are more along the lines of reducing CO2 (/CO/NOx/HCHO/NMOG/NMHC) emissions, oil consumption, monetary support to unfriendly OPEC nations, required maintenance, or fuel costs; or increasing support of new technology, renewable energy, etc. But, PM is certainly a health concern, so maybe the article's best use is just to point out that, as long as we're making a lot of other changes in our transportation system, maybe we should consider how we can change it to reduce PM emissions as well.
TL;DR: Science reporting fails again.
You probably live among cars smell, so you probably filter it out. I remember coming from the nearby mountains and getting out of the car in the city, appalling.
Anyway as you say smell is subjective.
Let us talk about the volume of vaporized stuff, this study says basically that modern cars let out less fuel fumes in 50000 km than the volume differential between new and used braking pads and tires.
I say somebody has misplaced a decimal point somewhere or is still using the fuel consumption data of volkswagen.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
They're taking into account regenerative breaking by assuming negligible PM emissions from the brakes of EVs. According to their literature study, most PM originates from resuspension which is linearly correlated to vehicle weight.
Their results (based on literature averages):
Comparison between expected PM10 emissions of EVs, gasoline and diesel ICEVs.
Vehicle technology Exhaust Tyre wear Brake wear Road wear Resuspension Total
EV 0 mg/vkm 7.2 mg/vkm 0 mg/vkm 8.9 mg/vkm 49.6 mg/vkm
65.7 mg/vkm
Gasoline ICEV 3.1 mg/vkm 6.1 mg/vkm 9.3 mg/vkm 7.5 mg/vkm 40 mg/vkm
66.0 mg/vkm
Diesel ICEV 2.4 mg/vkm 6.1 mg/vkm 9.3 mg/vkm 7.5 mg/vkm 40 mg/vkm
65.3 mg/vkm
The study doesn't look that bad. Would have been nice if they would have taken into account oil, electricity, car or road production as well.
The nice thing with my Tesla is I can charge virtually anywhere there's electricity. Granted, the superchargers take some time, but it's not a huge amount of time. Now, take the amount of time saved by charging every night. It takes only a few seconds to plug in and unplug vs the amount of time spent driving to one of a limited number of hydrogen refueling stations, waiting in line (if they're popular) and filling up. On top of that, the electricity is far cheaper than the hydrogen. Currently virtually all hydrogen is heavily subsidized since the actual price would not be cheap. Currently EVs are over twice as efficient compared to a hydrogen fuel cell car when once considers well to wheel. HFC vehicles aren't much better than hybrid vehicles when it comes to efficiency but they're still a lot more expensive to build. They have a very long way to go. Durability of the fuel cell stacks is currently about half that of a gasoline engine. A fuel cell stack as of the end of 2015 will need to be replaced at 75K miles. I did the math and the batteries in my Tesla will be good for at least double this. See this.
The 2016 Toyota Mirai, a subcompact, is only rated at 66MPG. A Prius is 58 city, 53 highway and costs less than half the price of the Mirai. BEVs are typically over 100 for a similarly sized car. For example, a 2013 Leaf is the equivalent of 115MPG, almost twice as efficient. My 3-year old Tesla, a much larger vehicle with a lot more passenger and storage room, is 89MPGe. The newer ones are even higher. The Model 3 should be considerably higher than that. Long term, I don't see HFC vehicles competing much against pure electric cars. The complexity alone means that they will always be more expensive, especially as the cost of batteries drops. The cost today of a Toyota Mirai is $58,335. This is for a car with 0-60 of 9.4 seconds and a top speed of 108MPH, not much better than a Prius. The Mirai will suffer the same problems as a Prius as well. The Mirai depends on a battery pack for acceleration and regenerative braking, just like a Prius. My last car was a Prius. It does poorly going up mountain grades and the Mirai will suffer the same problem. Unlike a Prius, the power output of the PEM stack will be considerably lower by 75K miles. A BEV car can put out considerably more power for a longer time since it isn't restricted to the limited output of the PEM stack. I've taken my Tesla up a number of steep mountain grades where my Prius would struggle without breaking a sweat. The Tesla Model 3 and other long range BEVs will cost considerably less than the Mirai. The Model 3 will also have considerably more room inside and storage space. The ONLY advantage the Mirai has is that it can be filled relatively quickly. In just about every other metric it falls short. Today I can take my Tesla most places in the country with the number of places I can't drive to without superchargers rapidly diminishing. By the time the model 3 rolls out the entire country will be pretty much covered. As it is, in California where most of them are sold, even out of the way places are getting covered. There's a charging station going in right near the entrance to Yosemite, for example and even highway 395 along the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains is covered.
Let's compare:
Hydrogen filling stations
vs
Plugshare chargers
Tesla Superchargers
Tesla Superchargers by the end of 2016 (click on 2016). This number should double by 2017.
The closest hydrogen fueling station to my house is 15 miles away from my house. My EV charging station is in my garage. This covers over 90% of my driving needs. I pay $50/month for the electricity and drive around 1000 miles/month. According to this article, the Mirai
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Not even close and I've got the freight scales to prove it. The fucking Tesla Model S-60 weighs 1961kg. A comparably-sized car would be the 2016 Taurus, at 1962kg.
25% my fucking ass, son.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Lies to prove your point, or just ignorance?
Taurus is a much bigger car than the Tesla for starters. And the S-60 has very low autonomy, but lets go with it.
Taurus specs: http://www.edmunds.com/ford/ta...
Tesla specs: http://www.edmunds.com/tesla/m...
The Tesla is 700lbs heavier than one of the heaviest sedans you could find for your comparison AND its a smaller car.
If you want to call bullshit, makes sure you smell your reply first.