Car tires shed a quarter of all microplastics in the environment. Urgent action is needed

Plus, there’s a ton of pollution and other environmental damage caused by battery production that at least partly offsets the lack of tailpipe emissions.

The battery production pollution is an issue, however one thing to keep in mind is that once the minerals are out of the ground they can be recycled, unlike drilling for oil. When looked at on a long timeline the battery for an electric vehicle is a lot cleaner than everything needed to power an ICE vehicle.

That said, there's always room for improvement and we should never get complacent. But we don't avoid innovation just because it isn't perfect.

It's not just tailpipe emissions, though - there's an entire supply chain of extraction, shipping, refining, delivery that's needed to get fuel to your local gas station.

The fossil fuel industry always wants to compare the total environmental damage of an EV with just what comes out of the tailpipe of an internal combustion vehicle. Don't fall for it.

This should be the definition of ‘letting perfect be the enemy of good’ Please stop using false oil lobby talking points to attack the transition to electric cars. Electric cars are an order of magnitude better for the environment than petrol/diesel, stop fighting big oils battle for them. Now let’s talk about how we can reduce road journeys through public transport, and reduce environmental impact of tires.

Is that true about the tires though? Electric car tires are designed to be substantially tougher because of the increase in weight, do they actually shed more material?

Given how terrible humans are at driving, I think flying cars are a horrible idea.

I’m looking forward to all the noise pollution. Drones, drones everywhere

They're testing them out on the East Coast, won't be long now.

Right?! They really over promised the future. I want my money back.

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Omg can you imagine? Instead of traffic lights we’d have boosters throwing us into loop de loops 😍

Can I yell vrrrrrrrooooommmmmmmm on the loops?

There are some vehicles that go on iron wheels, on a special kind of iron road that are very efficient. Only bad parts are costly initial investment and difficulties to scale up if the existing network gets overloaded (such as the Swedish rail system who has been over "maximum" capacity for a long time which has put needed maintenance on hold at many places)

Maybe there’s some kind of a wheel, like a metal wheel that could just glide across narrow metal surfaces that could follow a set path….

Hovercrafts have been around for ages. I'm not sure that the random driver would love using one though.

Well the was this idea of propelling trains through a vacuum tube system.

Unfortunately it's being developed by a shithead and misappropriated by the car industry to hamper railway development in the us

Hyperloop theoretically, practically who knows.

Let’s bring back post world war 2 motorbikes, affordable, reliable, unbeatable.

Kyburz Plus

imho we should tax any vehicle that puts an inordinate strain on the roads. ultra-heavy EV's like cybertrucks and hummers are ridiculous and inefficient, and the purchases knew it when they bought them.

but also the cummins diesel powered pavement princess my colleague drives BY THEMSELVES TO THEIR OFFICE JOB day after day, I think that should have to pay an excise tax.

work vehicles certainly deserve cutouts, but they need to be work appropriate vehicles, not just jacked up asshole haulers.

It would be funny though if some environmentalist managed to make the tax properly technology agnostic though. Mostly if you can keep them from being exempted anything that hurts EVs goes double for pickups.

Of course we both know gas cars get exempted whenever this sort of thing passes because it’s never actually about vehicle weight and road wear so much as how can we slow the decline in gasoline demand for a few years, but it’s nice to imagine that silver lining.

That does not address the issue at all. The problem is that tires wear, and the particles of tire rubber that are shed are the microplastics.

It has nothing to do with being "not profitable"; they couldn't find a way to engineer the tires to not be unstable at speeds above 45mph. They sell airless tires commercially today, but it's mostly for farm equipment that moves slowly.

Usually stuff like that is just a distraction so companies can do greenwashing while delaying the implementation of real solutions. I’m going to guess that’s the case but, I haven’t really looked into it.

Helping one problem and not helping them all means it's better to do nothing according to a lot of people. If you are anti cars that's one thing, but to specifically aim it at EVs is clearly just targeted propaganda as always.

Yes we put 100 years of research into gas powered cars, 15 years of research (or less by most companies) and the weight isn't the same yet so they want to toss all advantages of moving to them.

Look at things like the Telos Truck. 4,400 pounds, 4 doors, small and can fit a 8'x4' sheet of plywood if needed in the bed.

Length of a mini Cooper, so it fits in smaller parking spots, weighs less than the average ICE truck, costs less than the average ICE truck and will have less impact on tires people worry about here, while not shipping oil across oceans and causing cancer to the people in the vicinity.

A lot of people think that. The solution to car pollution is less cars and more forms of transport. It's trains. I like trains.

Binary view is a poor one. EVs have a lot of benefits and also some drawbacks. As everything in the world, they are not perfect. The trick is that they have much more benefits than drawbacks.

Less rubber is good but we really need a rubber replacement that is biodegradable.

Nickel alloys are expensive and require some nasty mining so shape memory tires are a stopgap solution at best.

There is a significant problem with media-reporting and scientific-studies being vetted for accuracy and peer-reviews.

Plastics are organic polymerized compounds usually I think that fall under Alkyl, isoprenes, monomers ?

Rubbers are organic polymerized compounds usually under elastomers / neoprenes / butadienes ?

We NEED more nuance and not fearmongering,scaremongering and FUD about the man-made pollutants.

Rubber pollution is a thing and plastics pollution is also a thing. How do we deal with each of them may require DIFFERENT strategies and NOT CRAZY-SHIT.

Its not only rubber for car tires. There's a lot of extras to add longevity, and change performance in certain conditions.

Plastic is mostly made from hydrocarbon chains. So are rubber polymers it seems.

Not sure if it matters if the plastic is from a tree or pumped from a really old tree.

If we make them out of asbestos (nature's perfect material) then it will eliminate microplastics and help to reduce car usership dramatically over the long term.