I get the criticism--why pay Tesla prices to fall 10-20% short of Tesla specs? But the fit and finish is a cut above the Model Ys we drove, the ride is very comfortable, and the electronic features are, while more primitive, more intuitive and predictable. We'll probably get the 2025 to replace our Subaru Forester (which we've been very unhappy with in terms of reliability). I hear the 2025 model squeezes another 30 miles or so out of the battery, which would enable us to make the trip to NYC on a single charge, which is the only complaint we have.

Performance oriented EVs, just like performance oriented ICE cars, are going to have softer, stickier tires that wear faster.

The other thing is poor alignment (especially toe settings) which cause the tyres to fight each other constantly. It can be a very small difference, almost imperceptible but still accelerate the wear.

10k miles is very short for a tyre.

Often you can tell a lot from the tyre temperature after a drive: if they're getting very warm, it can indicate problems, e.g. if one axle has much warmer tyres than the other (hard to give an objective standard on that, though, so many factors)

A friend got hit by this as well and since readjusting his driving style (read: not flying through corners for the fun of it) he gets more (but still not equal) miles on his EV's tires before he needs new ones.

I assure you. If your EV tires are only lasting 10K miles you have one of the following cases:

- You are driving VERY aggressively

- Your car has an alignment issue or some sort of torque vectoring problem

- Your tires are absolute shit

If driving Tesla, you can reduce the regenerative breaking from Maximum setting to Medium.

this will reduce regeneration and will increase the "breaking distance" when you just let go of accelerator pedal.

but it will increase your tire life significantly.

also make sure to buy the "commuter tire" models - tires with high mileage warranty (50k miles+) and harder compound. Even if it wears out faster, tire manufacturer's warranty will make up for it by giving you discount for the replacement tire purchase

But my inlaw has a neo from new and hasn't replaced the tyres yet, and hes an auto obsessive. He lives in the midlands and drives 18k a year.

I'm likely to end up replacing mine based on age-related degradation rather than wear.

I've got a Model 3 Performance which came with the Michelin Pilot Sport 4 tires which are only warrantied for 30,000 miles. I had them for 5 years and 35,000 miles and they STILL had plenty of tread left. I had to replace them anyways because I hit a nasty pothole that caused the tread to separate.

Next time get tires with a 50k mile warranty, like Pirelli Scorpions.

The Model X's curb weight ranges from 5,148 lbs to 5,531 lbs, while the Telluride's curb weight falls between 4,112 lbs and 4,482 lbs.

What this means is that you can push tires to the absolute limit and not chirp them (which, is best for traction anyways) which absolutely roasts them. Most people associate chirp = too fast, but with EVs you can never hear a chirp even when you stomp on the accelerator so they might think everything is ok.

Nobody should be shredding a set of tires in 10k miles in any EV unless they’re super low tread wear (poor tire choice, hard to do that bad), there’s an issue with the car suspension, or they’re just being idiots.

They're not low friction tires, they're low rolling resistance tires.

Friction relates to the grip, rolling resistance relates to the heat generated by the deformation of the tire. A less compliant, often narrower tire may wear faster than a more compliant wider one.

It depends.

"Tyres account for about a fifth of the energy required to power a car. They provide friction, so that the vehicle can grip the road, but some of the power supplied to the tyres is then lost as heat. Indeed, Michelin, a French tyremaker, estimates that this “rolling resistance” accounts for 4% of the world's carbon-dioxide emissions. Tyre designers have therefore sought to improve fuel economy by reducing rolling resistance. However, this not only reduces a tyre's ability to grip, making drivers take corners sideways, it also wears out the tyres more rapidly."

from: https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2009/12/02/ro...

without login: https://archive.is/TiIUk

Was very concerned until I realized you were talking about kilometers and not miles.

Otherwise, I'd hope the average driver would firce themselves to drive slower than 120mph out of some sense of fear, or at least a sense of self-preservation.

80km/h is the usual maximum allowed speed for trucks, at least in Germany, so no idea how a car driving 90km/h is such a big problem. That's not a "stationary object" at all, far from it. You are even allowed to drive vehicles with a minimum speed of 60km/h on the Autobahn.

If a car driving 90km/h is the cause for a traffic jam there are definitely other factors at play. Not just in zones with a limit of 120km/h but everywhere even without limits.

so just like any truck.

if you think it's a problem, you're the problem. sorry.

Ships are indeed more efficient if you look at it on per mile comparison but distances are much bigger. Shipping things from one side of the planet to the other is not something too efficient imo. It's just makes sense if you look at economics and differences in price of labor, regulations and so on but these do have externalities that eventually cancel out the benefits.

Quote : This intensive battery manufacturing means that building a new EV can produce around 80% more emissions than building a comparable gas-powered car

Show me anything else if you have ; just don't troll dude...

That this is considered a valid response to someone suggesting we need more mass transit is a sign that our discourse has fallen off a cliff. You can and should do better.

EVs are better than ICE cars, but shared-use buses/trains/etc. are often even better. We can do more than one thing.

How many people die in cell phone accidents yearly where you live? How many have reduced lifespans due to the pollution of cell phones? And how many hours can be saved per year per human with good cell phone sharing? I would guess the number is 0 for all of those, but quite a bit higher for cars alternative transportation options.

If you feel personally offended by the mere idea that there might be alternatives to cars, and that at the scale of a human settlement, they're often better, you need to take a step back and consider why you identify yourself with cars so much. And if that doesn't help, consider that more people having alternatives means less cars on the roads, so more space for you to vroom vroom around and less people bothering you on the road!

EV is not for everyone, but those Rivian are nice though. =3

In the UK at least, there are more EV chargers than gas/petrol stations: https://www.vertumotors.com/news/there-are-more-charging-poi...

Only laws (accommodate EVs and/or WFH) or spending time sitting at a gas station will help me here. No landlord is interested in accommodating an EV unless it's a net benefit to them (and thus a net negative to me, who already spends 40% income just to have a place to work.)

I'm sure there are some homeowners who can't - maybe listed buildings, or these weird HOA rules I hear about from Americans.

It is cleaner from a sulfur content and long-term carbon cycle perspective, but is very similar to regular fuels.

The dilemma is whether B100 it more difficult to scale than trying to retool our entire global energy infrastructure with finite rare earth metals. =3

Of course if you're commuting 2 hours every day, things will be different. But for us, it's been great.

We use perhaps 5% battery of our VW ID.3 on a typical day (school run, shops, visiting friends or whatever) so we just do an over-night top-up back to 80% maybe once a week when we get down to ~50%. Working surprisingly well - I am not sure I can be bothered to get the proper charger installed (which is annoying as I have already bought it and the cable for about £800 and its just sitting in my shed!)

Assuming a 120V / 20A = 2400W circuit (more or less standard in a garage):

100 parking spots = 200A / 24000W; 300 parking spots = 600A / 72000W.

So a distribution line can carry 72kW readily enough — that seems to be about where they are anyways — but if it's carrying that load, it cannot carry any other load, which means that each high-capacity parking garage will need a dedicated line from the nearest substation is.

Then, that parking garage will need to distribute that current to 300 parking spot chargers. Even at 120V/20A, that's 300 new circuit taps; 300 wires, initially. You can use three-phase to reduce that to 100 wires @ 120/20A or equivalent each, which is a lot. Or you can reduce that to 3 wires @ 120V/200A or equivalent, at which point you now have the safety considerations of an outdoor distribution wire in a small enclosed fire-prone space, and you're facing the christmas light problem of "one blown bulb" versus one third of your garage.

Then you need to confront "the chargers need to support burst-mode" so that people can push a button to get a temporary fast-charge ignoring all other concerns — but also "the chargers need to default to trickle-mode", while also considering that trickle-mode should run faster when fewer cars are plugged in (or else tenants will take offense that the chargers aren't using provisioned and available capacity), and that Time-of-Day concerns should cap trickle-mode during peak so that the grid doesn't fail. And that electric vehicles are foreseen as a component of localized grid storage, so garages might need to support backfeeding from cars.

And this all has to be coordinated across three hundred chargers and who knows how many feeder circuits, between one three-phase and three-hundred one-phase, assuming that 72kW (120V/600A) is provisioned to trickle-charge the entire garage each evening at 15A per car max (have to leave some headroom for the burst needs, for momentary overdraw before a charger fuses out a defective vehicle, etc).

This is all doable, but it is logistically expensive, and I would estimate that cost at perhaps tens of millions of dollars at that scale. Doing this for my old 12-apartment complex would merely require 2.4kW of new power delivery, taps, and distribution under the pavement (there's no room for overhead poles to be introduced), without sinking the property into the riverbed it's built on, and without breaking the local emergency services grid that it's drawing from when the creek next door floods every few years.

Retrofit costs are estimated at $5000-$15000 per single parking spot (new buildings are wired more efficiently so halve that cost for anything built since the Model S came out). California at one point was offering a 30% subsidy on retrofits; so, for my example, 300 spots * $5000-$15000 = ~2-4 million dollars (napkin rounded) for a single apartment complex. At local 1-bedroom housing prices, that's around 1000 rent-months of capital investment with no future gain — and that's the most critical part here. The complex cannot recoup that investment through maintenance and usage fees, because those will have to be paid out in actual maintenance and kilowatt-hours — and tenants, in this economy, cannot afford to subsidize the buildout cost.

So until retrofits are either state-funded or state-mandated, landlords have little to no reason to invest their money into the future of electric cars, because they'll get pennies on the dollar at best from their investment. And, given their tendency to collude via RealPage, no one will be the first to build out a 100% EV charging garage because that will not only long-term devalue their other properties without increasing the short-term value of the one improved, but also will start a race to the bottom that they are already colluding to try and prevent.

Yes, trickle-charging is electrically feasible — it's compelling the profitless capital investment that is not.

Yet every single morning and evening there is huge traffic jam around every city. Every single year highways are more full, more issue with parking.

If it can't be solved in such ideal country for public transport, I am not holding breath for rest of the world, and just wishing something ain't gonna make it real. There are many reasons why situation is as it is (it costs a lot, even such transport doesn't cover many people's cases well enough and nobody wants to spend 120 mins every day commuting via public transport when its say 60 with cars).

What I can imagine actually working - uber style shared robo (meaning cheap) taxis/minibuses. Big enough network that one can even switch a car in some 'taxi station' for more efficient trip that would take just marginally longer than driving oneself. This solves a lot of parking issues in cities and would reduce traffic to maybe half or a bit less.

Banning gasoline vehicles is the goal. In the U.S., all known solutions require capital investments that corporations can't extract a 'growth in profit growth over time' from, while disadvantaging the vehicle owners caste. Solve that, and you'll solve a lot more than just gasoline vehicles.

We have scaled it! We're a country of 330 million people where almost everyone drives.

> However because of American Exceptionalism, we have very limited options.

It's only "American Exceptionalism" insofar as Americans are rich compared to Europeans. Upper middle class people across Europe also live in suburbs and drive to places. American wealth/land space simply enables middle and lower middle class people to do the same thing.

Napkin math time. Assuming that Shanghai has ~1% of China's 420 million vehicles, given that Shanghai has ~2% of China's population (~8 million) and assuming a car ownership rate of 0.5; then Shanghai can be estimated to have 4 million vehicles, while only having 0.8 million charging locations (as the article indicates). 20% certainly does exceed 0.2%, and they're ahead of the game with ~2 charging locations per EV today — but that also means that they've only converted ~10% of Shanghai's gasoline vehicle population and are only provisioned to support 20% conversion right now.

However, I think that China has a significant advantage versus the U.S. — they are primarily selling very small vehicles for intra-city use. So, their charger capacities can be significantly lower per vehicle than in the U.S., which reduces their difficulty of electric conversations probably by a full order of magnitude from ours.

Typical car density for my nearest three grocery stores is 25-100 vehicles fluctuating during three or four peak hours. The highest number of chargers at any of those stores is 8, followed by 2 and 0; of those, 8 have been out of service for the past 60 days because someone is playing negotiation hardball with the charging services provider.

When the chargers were working, they were nearly at capacity for the entire day, at current (low) levels of electric car fraction of the population; there's no way they're prepared to cope with a full conversion, at which point the same power density and distribution problem that impacts multifamily parking garages instead (or as well!) affects grocery stores.

Credits are indeed a scam but they are not a mandatory component of a carbon externality tax.

Exactly, as long as no one sees it, it isn’t happening. Same with them burning plastic and trash.

Because of math.

A 6 kW house, to charge a 60 kW battery… so long as everyone with an electric vehicle is charging them at their house for 10 sunny hours to charge from empty, you’re right and I’m wrong.

Some people could get by, but it leaves the solar for nothing else. If you leave the house while the sun is up you better get back because you’re losing daylight!

Changes on this scale take time. But to make the islands much less dependent on fossil fuels, a two-pronged strategy is in play. Reduce fossil fuel generation, but also reduce the dependence on fossil fuel in transport.

As a long-term strategy, reducing the cost of importing all that fuel, over vast distances, seems to be a huge win for the islands. In every way (politically, economically, socially, environmentally) generating their own energy is a win.

Pollution and environmental destruction are big problems, but there are no remotely likely scenarios where the Earth "is wrecked by pollution" and a HN reader would need to question the viability of remaining on the planet.

The all people here shitting on reality - are doing so because they’re defending their purchases.

Most people with EV as a primary vehicle were fooled into marketing that does not accurately reflect the product, and they don’t want to hear otherwise.

And how will all the people that are buying 500€ second hand cars afford electric?

Don't get me wrong, I think there is merit in a ICE free future, especially in urban areas, but the practicalities.. And I am not convinced the long term impacts of EV are fully appreciated necessarily.

Again, that's your personal choice.

We've got off road and on road tyres we still use with four to five tyre plugs in them that have lasted a few years since their last puncture.

I'm in non urban Australia and have cars actively used with > 500,000 km on the clock. We were raised to maintain gear; be it cars, trucks, aircraft, excavators, bob cats, etc.

Annoyingly, plugs are not perfect either: after a tyre has been plugged I’m putting air in it like every 2 months, so anecdotally I guess the plugs leak really slowly.

Yeah a proper internal glue on patch would likely perform better in the shoulder but ain't nobody got time for that, that's like 90% of the work of changing the tire.

You can do it in an automatic, you just have to force it to select a lower gear using the gear number options (1, 2, 3, 4) or using the tiptronic mode. The lower gear means the engine will displace more air in the same amount of time, increasing the rate it pulls energy from the wheels.

People think you can't do it in automatics because they try very hard to keep engine RPM low where the effect is diminished.

It’s just trivially easy with electric thanks to regen braking.

Though with modern cars getting heavier if you have a small ICE these days you have almost no engine brake which makes some cases more difficult (unless it’s a mild hybrid with an electric kers like some of the small engined fords). SUVs tend to have giant engines and pretty high rolling resistance, which I’d think would somewhat compensated for their higher inertia.

It’s all about learning your car’s behaviour and planning for it.

With an EV I don't touch breaks unless in situations I fail to/couldn't predict (maybe up to 10% of all speed reductions and even less stops).

I also like the noise, but it is noise pollution that is very annoying to everyone else.

> was difficult to get used to

To ask the obvious, how used to something are you going to get on a test drive? It takes time.

The key takeaway is that there are differences to driving an EV to driving an ICE vehicle. Equally those differences are in fact easy to adjust to given a bit of practice.

Of course cars have always had different control options. Automatic and Manual gearboxes spring to mind. When I first learned some cars had a gear selector as an arm on the steering column, and so on.

EVs like a somewhat gentler foot, because the torque is instant, so a heavy foot is likely to be a more uncomfortable ride.

So yes, different cars, different styles. But of course we adjust very quickly, and its not really difficult to drive anything- it just takes a bit of practice.

All to say, check out a few to be sure, im still shocked how much i love driving this thing (and how criminally fast it is, totally absurd).

Secondly, I rented an EV for a week and by the end of it actually preferred the strong regen setting. It was convenient in stop-start traffic, and on a twisty road, you could use it to tighten the nose as you entered the corner.

Are you not? Do you drive by blipping the gas every few seconds?

I've had Uber drivers do this and it is annoying bordering on nauseating as a passenger. It is probably pretty bad for mileage and transmission wear as well (constantly taking up and releasing the backlash in the gears).

For example here is how it works in Hyundai EVs (and I'd guess Kia too). It is easy to set them so that they drive very similar to an ICE. I believe several others also work similarly. There are only a few that try to really push you to one pedal driving.

1. When use explicitly use the brake pedal that car uses regenerative braking unless you are trying to stop faster than regeneration can handle in which case it will also use the friction brakes.

There may be a setting somewhere in the settings menus where you can adjust how strong the braking is, but I don't remember because the way the car comes from the factory the brake peddle feels a lot like an ICE car's brake peddle.

2. There is a regeneration level setting that controls what happens when you ease up on the accelerator or remove your foot from it. This setting has 6 possible settings: Level 0, 1, 2, 3, i-Pedal, and Auto.

There are two paddles on the steering wheel that let you move through these settings quickly and easily, and you can do this while driving so you are free to pick whatever setting fits the conditions and your mood the best. Here's what they do.

• In level 0 there is no braking associated with the accelerator. Take your foot off and the car coasts is if it was in neutral.

• Level 1 provides a small amount of automatic braking when you let up on the accelerator. In ICE terms it is similar to the engine braking you would get on level ground going fast enough to be in 3rd gear in a 3 speed automatic. You slow down faster than coasting, but not so fast that if you were on the freeway and your felt the need to shake your right leg around a little it would slow enough to be a problem.

• Levels 2 and 3 step up the amount of automatic braking. 3 is enough that in city driving most of the time you can be quite leisurely when it comes to moving your foot from the accelerator to the brake at most stop signs, but it will not bring your car to a complete stop. It will get quite slow and then creep at that speed.

• i-Pedal is one pedal driving mode and corresponds to what that EV you test drove was doing. In this the braking is similar to level 3 as far as aggressiveness goes, but it will take you all the way to a stop most of the time. Once you get used to it you should be able to do most city driving and most highway driving without touching the brake pedal. About the only times you would need the brake pedal (outside of emergencies) is if a light changes on you when you are too close to the intersection.

• Auto mode automatically switches between 0, 1, 2, and 3 based on the distance to the vehicle in front (using the same system that adaptive cruise control uses) and the slope of the road. If you are on the freeway for example with a good distance between cars it will be in 0 or 1. In the city where you are close to the next car it might be in 2 or 3.

• If you press and hold the "increase regen level" paddle for at least 0.5 seconds it will switch from whatever your current setting is to i-Pedal and stay in i-Pedal as long as you continue to hold the paddle. Release the paddle and it switches back to whatever your previous setting was.

This system gives you plenty of flexibility and you should be able to easily find a setting you like. Some people really like one pedal driving and so they can just put it in i-Pedal and leave it there (with a slight annoyance...when you turn the car off in i-Pedal it comes back on in level 3, so you will have to hit the regen up paddle once).

Some people set it to one of the numbered levels and leave it there (again with slight annoyance at startup where it comes on at 1 so they need a paddle flick or two).

Some people use the paddles instead of the brake pedal, mixing levels to get the kind of deceleration curve they want.

I normally drive in level 0, with an occasional day or two in i-Pedal just for a change of pace, but if I'm coming up on a series of roundabouts I might switch it to i-Pedal. That's great for say a 35 mph road with 10-15 mph roundabouts every couple of blocks. (If it is just one roundabout I'd probably use the "hold regen up paddle for 0.5 seconds" option to just turn on i-Pedal for that intersection.

Every other EVs and HVs assign first half of brake pedal for regen and bottom half for mechanical brakes. Tesla uses bottom half of gas pedal for the same, which eliminates the need to accurately determine the appropriate pedal force that corresponds to intended braking force to be added up with regen to match intended deceleration. Mapping regen to gas is `set_motor_torque(1.25 * gas_pedal - 25);` and that's much simpler.

i believe there is also a chinese company which is making such a car, their cars have nearly 1000 miles range.

The Toyota Prius powerchain has two motor generators, and can take part of the ICE power from one and transfer it electrically to the other, remapping the engine RPM into more efficient power bands at the same time. It has a mode that can do this even when no power is being used from the battery.

It’s kind of a best of both worlds. They can avoid the extra weight of a full series hybrid, because they don’t need a motor generator pair that handles the full engine power.

Actually, power bands remapping is essential for the Prius to operate.

There is no clutch, there is no neutral gear, there is no torque converter. The ICE is always connected directly to the wheels with a fixed gear ratio on a planetary gear set. (Which improves transmission efficiency over a automatic/CVT gearbox, and actually reduces maintenance costs)

One of the motor-generators is on the 3rd input of the planetary gear. For the ICE to idle (during warm up, or when you have the heater on), the motor-generator much be spinning backwards at the exact same speed so that the wheels stay stationary.

Power band remapping can also be used for reversing when the battery is empty.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLUIExAnNcE has more info.

But then, do you end up removing enough battery weight to offset the weight of a whole ICE?

> The LEVC TX is powered by a full-electric hybrid drivetrain. It drives in full-electric mode all the time, but is recharged by an 81-horsepower (60 kW; 82 PS) Volvo-sourced 1.5-litre turbocharged three-cylinder petrol engine.

The #1 reason for (european) companies not buying full EV vans is range, they need to drive a LOT during the day.

REX would solve that with minimal emissions. And depending on the battery size, they could drive on full EV in city centres and only allow the REX to charge the battery during longer drives.

The BMW i3 REX is a fantastic car, if you can find one, buy it.

Assume the car gets 4 miles per kWh delivered and the charging cycle is 90% efficient (measured from generator output). The 2.2kW generator can add 8 miles/hour of generator runtime (2.2 kW * 0.9 * 4 miles/kWh).

For range anxiety of the form "we're driving to a destination pretty far away and I'm not sure we can get there", that's not very helpful. For range anxiety of "I'm driving to a destination that's over half my range and then going to spend a full day [or overnight] there, but I'm not sure there will be working chargers available there", charging 8 mph times 8-10 hours is very helpful.

Worrying about being stuck in the boondocks without a charger is addressed by an 8 mph on-board charger, but I think that's the less common form of range anxiety.

The Chevy Volt range extender was 75kW; the i3's was 26.6kW. 2.2kW is literally an order of magnitude too small to replace those.

Re: maintenance, small engines typically are pretty needy. That one wants an oil change, spark plug gap adjustment, and spark arrestor cleaning every 100 hours of use. The latter two are only usage-based, but the oil is time-based as well (6 months) since it oxidizes, and suffers from fuel dilution. Then there’s the fuel: god help you if you put ethanol gas into a small engine and let it sit for any period of time. It’s often difficult to find E0 fuel, and while there are external fuel tanks for generators that can hold quite a bit, they also tend to vent vapor in the heat (as does any tank, including a car’s), which is unpleasant when it’s in your frunk.

Finally, engines of all kinds really don’t like being left sitting for months on end unless prepared to do so. Generally you want to run them monthly, getting them up to operating temperature, putting a load on them for a bit to fully exercise all components.

I say all this because I have an EU2200i and dearly love it, but am also painfully aware of its limitations and needs. I got it when I lived in Texas because the power outages were getting to be absurd, and my house wasn’t plumbed for natural gas, so a whole-house was out of the question. The 2200i was plenty to power two fridges, a deep freezer, TV, fans, and my server rack. I got really good at quickly running extension cords (which is a whole other discussion on ensuring proper amperage ratings and calculating voltage drop, something most people ignore).

You’d need to tow around a 7.2kW 240V for 30A at 240V (more likely a 14.4kW generator for 240V 60A).

Using the small Honda inverter generator (which is amazing for plenty of stuff!) is akin to covering your car in solar panels to get range extension, the math just doesn’t work out.

I'm also surprised for the first few minutes when I drive it how little "engine braking" it has (my habit is from riding a big motorbike).

There are some really good videos out there going over how newer CVTs work. Looks like some people are working on ones that are teeth driven, to reduce the loss from being free belt driven. Borderline magical stuff, all told. (Obviously, not magic magic. But very very impressive designs.)

> The gas engine has maximum efficiency at about 80% throttle.

ICE efficiency varies in multiple dimensions based on load and RPM, and in a series hybrid, you have some ability to dynamically influence these... throttle would be one of those inputs.

Also known as breaking. You could just do that once in a while.

They’re enclosed so they don’t get dirty, the inner face of drum will rust less than discs, fade is not an issue thanks to regen braking, and before they get too hot and fade drums will brake harder than disks (thanks to a higher pad surface area). And they’re enclosed so they also keep the brake dust inside the drum, making it easier to dispose of safely.

Drums are heavier tho.

> They should add some “brake cleaning” mode to temporarily disable regenerative braking.

Some manufacturers do that (iirc tesla calls it burninshing, others will switch regen off completely if you switch to neutral or something).

I've read that Audi and Porsche will use regular brakes once or twice at the start of every drive instead of regen, I assume using electronic control to imitate the current state of regen braking.

Also is it only pedal braking? Or does it "fake" things out if you use one-pedal driving?

Let me guess this straight, the plan would be that:

1. in a global environment (the following steps are done everywhere around the world)

2. where maximum speeds, though:

- clearly marked everywhere

- mentioned during driving lessons and driving codes/books

- part of the written driving exam every driver has to pass

- enforced by police, cameras, a myriad of automated systems etc

3. are still ignored by, say, 40%+ of drivers

... so, the plan would be that in this environment, mandating minimum speeds would actually improve anything? :-)))

I'd be super happy to read the study proving this. Where by study, I mean actual physical trial.

Exactly. Rush hour is like dumping 5gal bucket into a sink. You'll always be bottlenecked by the drain but a better drain will mean all the drops get where they're going faster and with less waiting around.

Let's discard everything but road maintenance?

No thanks. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-mitigation-15c

But people already had this entire debate decades ago when disc brakes were first implemented. If you are racing or using a lot of braking power, discs are obviously better, they have better heat dissipation, they are quicker to repair and replace, more predictable for analog/dumb traction and stability control systems, and getting them rusty and dirty isn't a concern because you are racing and/or using the shit out of them. And most of the disadvantages became of little concern to consumers because when the consumer market moved towards automatic transmissions and smaller displacement engines people stopped engine braking constantly and were instead clearing their brakes off at literally every stop so dirty disc brakes stopped being a common concern. But the downsides still exist and is why disc brakes haven't taken over all applications.

Like yeah, drums have less heat capacity and worse cooling, but the entire point of regenerative braking is that you don't use them as much and so heat issues don't matter, only a small fraction of your braking force will use the physical brakes. Ideally in an EV your physical brakes are 100% a safety item, not a common usage item, and so reliability should be the top concern.

And those people who would lose money are the EV manufacturers. AFAIK in the US EV manufacturers are barely making money even with gov’t subsidies (baring Tesla). They can’t charge what would be necessary without subsidies because most people simply wouldn’t want or couldn’t afford such a product at that price point.

In the first gen Nissan Leaf you can toggle between two levels of regeneration by toggling "B mode" which mimics automatic transmission car's behavior in "Hill mode" or when disabling "Overdrive". In the Leaf it just increases regeneration strength when you let off the accelerator. Similarly you can adjust the acceleration curve by disengaging "Eco mode".

Turning Eco mode off and Hill mode on makes the Leaf a lot of fun to drive on winding mountain roads. Unfortunately you only get like 15 minutes of drive time...

Series hybrids also have the ability to dump excess power just like you are suggesting as well. Instead of resistor banks (like trains) they often dump energy by using the generator to spin the engine… literally engine braking.

I preferred downshifting VS braking, personally

I also use the built in "hilltop reserve" feature, which limits charging to 90%. This ensures that there is always regen resistance, and therefore a consistent experience.

Some people are very responsible with money - they have an emergency fund, contribute to their retirement fund, and don't carry a credit card balance.

Other people (who have a choice) spend to 0 every month, don't save, and have maxed out credit cards.

In the same way, some people drive very safely; they keep a responsible distance between them and the driver in front of them, and don't tend to speed much. I think this style of driving would naturally lead to what you say - less use of friction breaks in general, and especially at highway speeds.

And other people are constantly speeding, and tailgate the person in front of them when their path is blocked. For the people who drive this way, the greater acceleration of EVs just lets them drive that much more recklessly. Which ends up necessitating even more usage of friction brakes.

I still expect EVs to be a net improvement on brake dust. just not as massive as the study. maybe about 1/2 - 1/3 of the study's results