Electric Vehicle owners continue to find themselves the victims of a massive global bait-and-switch. They bought the car thinking it would save the planet (jokes on you, fool) only to discover hidden costs, from insurance to longer and more expensive repair times, for a car that’s not really green, that isn’t running on green energy, and now this.
Tires.
EVs are extremely heavy, causing significantly more wear on roads and bridges and, naturally, on the tires rolling across them.
Tyre manufacturer Michelin has previously said that conventional tyres wear out around 20pc faster in an electric vehicle, while Goodyear said they can degrade as much as 50pc faster.
Last year, research by technology firm Epyx found that, on average, tyres fitted to EVs lasted 6,350 fewer miles than those on petrol or diesel cars. The first tyre change for electric cars takes place after an average of 17,985 miles, compared to 24,335 miles for petrol and diesel cars.
Tires are not a green commodity (not that many, if any, of the self-proclaimed green commodities are), which means your EV purchase, whose environmental bill of materials continues to carbonize the earth (if you still believe that’s even a problem), can add some more carbon to its ledger.
Every time you need new tires, you are degrading the planet (your worldview, not mine). From manufacture to delivery to installation to the increase in particulates in the air that results from the more rapid wear (every time you drive it), you are a driving contradiction.
It reminds me of the Tyre Extinguishers. “Green’ Activists that puncture SUV tires as punishment for driving a larger Internal combustion engine. It is supposed to be pro-green, but doing so comes with a litany of dirty side effects.
How many unnecessary calls (cellular networks emit carbon) were made for tow trucks or auto club services to come and reinflate them, or calls to the police who had to drive out to file a report? And how often was it two of these things and not just one? Call the police. Call the European equivalent of AAA. Emissions, emissions, emissions.
Depending on the miles driven, round trip by police or services, plus the emissions from the compressors to reinflate the tires or generators to run the compressors, you’ve likely added a pile of unnecessary crap into the biosphere … in the name of reducing it.
And did you walk to wherever it is you went to deflate all the tires, or did you catch a ride there and there and there and back?
Depending on the type of damage (you can’t repair sidewall breaches) and the carbon footprint for the manufacture, delivery, and replacement of the old tires with new ones (we should add calls to insurance companies and all the carbon generated on that end as well), and let’s not forget the disposal of the damaged tires, it’s all a big brown act of environmental sabotage.
Stupid.
