Yeah, make them out of metal, that rolls on metal roads. And those metal tires can carry a ton more weight, so put a lot of people in them who are going the same way.
Oh right, we already have those.
¿Por qué no los dos?
Adam, is that you? 😉
Hah!
Noooo, you don’t get it, bro. Just one more lane, please. I promise, it will be better than last time. One more lane, that’s all we need. I’m begging you, please.
I’m on my knees here. One more lane, just one more! This time it will be different, I swear. We won’t have traffic jams, I promise! Just one more lane and we’ll be free.
Come on, man, think of the children. Just one more lane. I’m begging you. For the love of liberty, just one more lane!
Did tech bros just reinvent the concept of trains?
Though “those” are wildly inaccessible and/or unrealistic in parts of the world.
Edit: I was trying to say “unrealistic to use for most people today,” I wasn’t trying to brush off public transportation as something we shouldn’t do at all
That’s a policy issue, not one of engineering or physical constraints.
No, there are definitely physical and engineering issues, like massive rolling mountains and valleys, or island chains or deserts whose sand is unsuitable to durable railways.
Those are Edge Case. There will almost always be edge cases where we have engineering or physical constraints, but we have solutions for almost all individual trips.
You know that Switzerland, a country in the literal Alps, has one of the best train infrastructures on Earth?
As the other comment said, of course there are fringe cases. There shouldn’t even be a city in Dubai, let alone trains getting there, but fortunately, most cities on earth are in accessible places because, well, otherwise why would thousands upon thousands of people go there.
Definitely realistic, just not as profitable for rich billionaires.
whispering more trains
Trains are the best electric vehicles
Sometimes too many trains is a thing.
Do you have an example of this?
So this big breakthrough in tire technology is . . . making them harder and reducing their grip?
EV are much heavier than petrol cars, maybe the offset weight will help regain some grip? Normal tires wear out so fast on EVs.
That extra weight will also mean that more force is required to accelerate and change directions.
The nimbleness of a vehicle can be expressed as the ratio:
(Tire Contact Area * Tire Stickiness) / Vehicle Mass
Increasing the vehicle’s mass while making the tires harder will lead to longer breaking distances and will cause a vehicle to understeer at lower speeds.
Now how about using iron tires on iron road? And using public transport?
I support public transport but I really don’t know how to convince people. I live in North America.
Although I agree that using cars on pointless journeys is a waste and not good for the planet, but using public transport isn’t always an option.
If I’m travelling 6 miles in to town then I’m taking the tram, but it really isn’t feasible when travelling 40 miles to work and back 3 times a week. Sure there are trains, but I would have to get up an hour earlier, set off an hour earlier, wait 50 minutes for the train home, and get home two hours later. As I would also have to take the tram 40 minutes to the train station and walk 20 mins before that.
I have a car that I use for work. Outside of that I’m walking or taking public transport.
wait 50 minutes for the train home
Same was in Moscow until Moscow Central Ring was opened and people said “wait, so trains can arrive at 2 minutes interval? Why suburban trains doesn’t do same?”. And that is how D1-D4 were born with 5m peak hours interval instead of few hours of lunch break.
If I’m travelling 6 miles in to town then I’m taking the tram, but it really isn’t feasible when travelling 40 miles to work and back 3 times a week.
“My city is fucking designed wrong so the public transport sucks” isn’t really the rebuttal you think it is. Obviously, the real problem there is your city is fucking designed wrong and the vast majority of people shouldn’t have to be living 40 miles away from work to begin with!
I live in Manchester. Which is an amazing city for public transport. I work in Cheshire which isn’t.
As I said. To take the train. I must walk from my town 20 minutes to the Metrolink, then take that 35-40 minutes into Manchester, then take the train 45 minutes to Cheshire, and then finally walk another 20 minutes to the office. That’s without counting any waiting periods in between. VS 75 minute drive.
We haven’t even factored in it rains 70% of days here. Or even the cost.
You can moan at my boss for not allowing fully WFH. But my point was some people can’t just commute everywhere. Perhaps when I’m more experienced I can find a job closer to home or more remote, but for now this is all I can do.
Edit: I have nothing to rebut to people online. I was merely giving an example. Get off your high horse mate.
What kind of backhanded EV misinformation bullshit is this?
Electric, gas, petrol, hydrogen, diesel, cooking oil or vodka; what you put in your car to make it go makes no difference to the tires or the wear.
It does. EVs are much heavier due to battery weight and have more power and torque. Which all results in more tire wear.
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Agreed. Here’s example of properly-engieneered EV for city in use:
From the article:
In an EV era, tires are becoming the greatest emitters of particulate matter
The point being that electric drops tailpipe emissions to zero, making tires the next target for reducing emissions.
That sentence and headline are completely wrong though. Tires already are one of the greatest emitters of particulate matter even with ICE cars in mind, because this is a general car issue and cannot really be directly resolved. An improvement would be less weight. If cars were smaller and consequently lighter, then they’d pollute less. But unfortunately we are still going the opposite direction and cars are still getting fatter and fatter, just like the people driving them.
Hot take: tire particulates are a conservative anti-EV talking point. “My V8 mustang weighs less than an EV, therefore its better on pollution than a EV because tire particulates”. Totally disregarding the impact of tailpipe emissions.
It is also a vaild anti-car talking point.
!fuckcars@lemmy.world material
I think it’s just reminding people that EVs aren’t a panacea to all our issues with transportation, and they actually exacerbates at least one of those issues. This is while we know there are better solutions for >90% of our personal transportation with public transportation, bicycling, walking, micro-mobility, etc. Moving one or two people around with a multi-tonne machine is insanely inefficient!
No it’s not, because conservatives don’t think micro plastics are a problem. Pretty soon there will be truck bros making tiktoks competing to see how quickly they can destroy a set of tires just to “trigger the libs”.
Anecdotally, so far I’ve noticed cars getting louder
One person I know claimed to have run calculations, and found that the tire dust alone was putting out more pollution than the tires and tailpipe of the average gas car. Idk where they got their numbers or how that could work out, since the average gas car in America is a large truck.
It could be true. Catalytic converters do a pretty good job of filtering out most pollutants. They also increase CO2 emissions in a variety of direct and indirect ways. Everything else is lower, though.
The way to make EV tires pollute less is to not chase 600+ mile range. Keep them around 300-400 miles, and use further battery improvements to reduce weight. There’s no reason EVs have to be heavier forever. With better charging infrastructure, 400 miles is more than enough.
The way to fix everything else wrong with them is to not make cars the default mode of transportation.
The way to fix everything else wrong with them is to not make cars the default mode of transportation.
Say it again louder for the folks in the back!
The “everything else” wrong with cars dwarfs the issue of pollution. Cars being the default mode of transportation is ultimately responsible for everything from obesity to the housing crisis!
There’s no reason EVs have to be heavier forever
That’s a bit of a stretch, unfortunately. The energy density of batteries is nowhere close to that of gasoline - joule for joule, gasoline weighs about 100 times less than batteries. Also, a fuel tank big enough to give its vehicle a 400 mile range will get lighter over the course of the trip, as the liquid fuel gets converted into polluting gas and exhausted into the atmosphere - batteries don’t get appreciably lighter as you discharge them.
Agree that 400 miles range with charging stations as ubiquitous as today’s gas stations would help EV adoption. I do worry about the rollout of charging stations being slowed down by competition with expensive and fragile hydrogen tech (keep the hydrogen on boats and trains pls).
Hardly a stretch. The comparison isn’t to the power density of gas, but overall curb weight. EVs are roughly 10% heavier than an ICE equivalent. Batteries are the main reason for that (electric motors and the electronics to support them aren’t that much). Batteries have also been improving Wh/kg by 5-8% per year. It only takes a few years of improvements to get there.
In fact, since the 10% number has been the case since around 2020 or so, the battery tech might already be there and we just need to get them into new models.
Edit: another way to think about it is what’s been taken out of an ICE and replaced with something else. It’s not just the engine, but an entire engine life support system. Coolant radiator, oil, transmission, gas tank, and ignition system. Possibly differentials, as well, depending on the electric drive train. It’s replaced with motors (which don’t weigh much for the power they output compared to ICEs), some electronics (which do need to be beefy to handle the current involved, but also don’t weigh that much, relatively speaking), the battery (major source of weight), and the battery does usually need a cooling system, as well. So you don’t need to compare it to the energy density of gas, but of all the stuff you replaced.
Is this an ad?
