Brakes certainly, but all motion still needs to be stopped through friction against the ground. EVs are significantly heavier for the time being, so if anything they have greater wear on tires all else equal.
Some EVs are significantly heavier, but it's not all doom and gloom. Doesn't a basic Model 3 tip the scales at about 3500 pounds or so (maybe it went up a bit for the LFP version)? That's pretty much par for the course in a car that size. Heck, a Mustang GT weighs more than that.
I could believe 10%. It's not an easy apples to apples comparison, of course, because even a basic RWD Model 3 is considerably higher performance than a base model 320i. We may just have to accept that, however, since it's too easy to make EVs a lot faster than ICEVs at the same price point.
> but all motion still needs to be stopped through friction against the ground
But that's not really true, either with an EV with regen braking or standard brakes. With standard brakes, it's the friction and heat at the brake pads that causes deceleration. With regen braking, the energy of deceleration is going to charge the batteries.
In both cases you need traction and tire wear to slow down. The tires don't care if it's brake pads getting hot or batteries being charged to accomplish it.
Is that true though? Energy has to go somewhere, but if you store a large part of that energy into batteries, doesn't that take away from what you have to expend on friction with the road?
After all, energy can't be created or destroyed. So if you're storing it in batteries, it's coming out of your forward momentum.
100%. Brakes do not stop a car, tires do. Brakes just manage the energy. Putting it back into a battery so it can be used to accelerate again is great, but it's still the tires stopping the car.
Brakes _do_ stop a car. You're converting energy of motion into heat. That is not the tires doing that. You are not transferring significant amounts of energy into the road or into heating up the tires.
Now in the case of regenerative braking, the losses from the charging do also dissipate the energy, but most of it goes back into the battery to be used for driving which, over time, is transferred into the tires and the air.
It's important to remember that ideal wheels are not actually moving with respect to the surface they roll over. From the tire's perspective the road is not moving in any direction other than up and down, repeatedly touching the tire and then not touching it again at different points. As long as you maintain static friction when braking and don't start skidding, for ideal wheels, you're not transferring any energy to the tire or to the road.
Now, real tires are not ideal wheels so there's some differences, but those are minor components compared to the majority of energy being dissipated in charging the battery or into heating up/wearing down brakes. And indeed when driving, the majority of loss of energy is from air resistance, not the tires.
Sure, from a lay perspective. Though I stop my car routinely without ever touching the brakes. Even my gas car does a non-trivial amount of braking without using friction pads. But the point stands. Brakes don't touch the road, the tire does, so it matters not at all how you apply force to the wheel, from the perspective of the tire-to-road interface it's all the same.
If we want to have some fun with the physics, brake pads don't use dynamic friction to stop the car, either. Not most of the time, at least. Which is why they last as long as they do.
I was responding to the idea in the previous post that it was somehow that tires stop the cars rather than brakes or regenerative braking.
> Brakes don't touch the road, the tire does, so it matters not at all how you apply force to the wheel, from the perspective of the tire-to-road interface it's all the same.
This is not the case. Brakes (or regenerative braking) absorb the energy of motion into heat or stored chemical energy. The tires are not doing the stopping.
> brake pads don't use dynamic friction to stop the car
This is also incorrect. Brake pads are using almost completely dynamic friction to stop the car. From the perspective of the brake bads the tire is moving and from the perspective of the tire the brake pads are moving. There's no static friction involved there.
You aren’t regaining 100% of the kinetic energy so a significant part has to be lost somewhere else. Realistically regenerative braking is recouping energy that would be lost as heat when the friction brakes act on the wheels.
However it would not stop a vehicle on a zero friction surface, as a simple example, so no it doesn’t take away from the friction heat losses on the road.
Energy that would normally have been lost in heating up/destroying the brake pads instead goes into the battery, of course. But I don't see why this alone would affect the tire tread.
There is 1x to 4x factor for tire emission from one model to another, so people so concerned about emission from 20% more mass seems a little silly when there is no test or emission standards for tire, but euro 7 will add it.
