Wrecking the roads to save the nation from 0.01 degree C?
Electric cars may cause twice as much damage to roads as normal petrol driven cars.
EV’s are heavier, and heavier cars may break bridges and car parks, they wear out tyres 50% faster, increasing pollution, they will cause more road deaths (of other people in smaller cars), and now, they probably wear out roads faster too.
Did anyone think about the carbon emissions of new asphalt and new road surfaces?
Major roads are built to take heavier trucks, but suburban streets were only designed to cope with the occasional truck — not the truck that lives next door. When every car has 300 kilograms more “luggage” there will be consequences.
And remember underlying all this, no one even knows if EV’s will reduce carbon dioxide. An e-Golf has to be driven 100,000 kilometers just to break even with a diesel equivalent. With all these extra lifetime costs, if carbon dioxide mattered at all, EV’s might end up raising global temperatures. But who cares about that eh?
It’s not about carbon, and it’s not about the environment. It’s about control.
Thanks to Tallbloke
Pothole damage from electric cars is double that of petrol, Telegraph data show
Jack Simpson, The Telegraph
The country is suffering from a pothole crisis, with half as many filled last year compared to a decade ago amid an estimated £12 billion price tag to fill them all.
The Telegraph found that the average electric car puts 2.24 times more stress on roads than its petrol equivalent, and 1.95 more than diesel. Larger electric vehicles weighing over 2,000kg (2 tons) cause the most damage, with 2.32 times more wear applied to roads.
The AA reported last month that the number of pothole-related call-outs it had received had grown by a third in a year, with the company responding to 52,000 incidents in April alone.
A little bit of weight creates bigger better holes in the road:
Fourth power formula
The analysis uses the “fourth power formula”, which is widely used by highways engineers and researchers to assess the damage caused to road surfaces by heavier vehicles. It means that if weight on a vehicle’s axle is doubled, it does 16 times the damage to the road.
Cut the subsidies, recover fair costs, and the free market will sort this one out.
Potholes photo: David Wright Creative Commons 2.0
