A surprisingly compelling subject
Dinner table, or social media, conversation may centre on arguments over which football team deserves to win the league, or whether the Mustang or Camaro is better, but the common feature of such polemics is that they represent simple and interesting questions. The topic of tyres, however, and if you dare raise it, may stun your companions into silence. Tyres are not simple and interesting. They are complex and boring – at least on the outside.
Fear, uncertainty and doubt in an age of decarbonisation
Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt. This rhetorical triptych is increasingly used as an insult to describe interventions from anyone who deviates from the current environmental orthodoxy. When French philosopher René Descartes sat down in the seventeenth century Netherlands to write his Discourse on Method, he also faced FUD.
In our last newsletter we looked at the unethical challenge set by a high profile academic to see whether you would die if locked inside your garage with an internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle running.
Increasingly simplistic calls to #Stopburningstuff and #Stickyourselftothings have recently been accompanied by another call: that anyone who challenges the virtues of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) should shut themselves in their garage alongside their idling internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle for an hour, to see whether they emerge to tell the tale.
Friday 18 September 2015 saw Dieselgate break. This was the culmination of a growing dissonance between real-world nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions and official values for cars and vans. The rupture was created by governments picking a technology, for the purposes of decarbonisation, where too much was taken on trust within a fragile governance system.
The term ‘environmental justice’ can often be used in a mushy, socialistic sense, but behind it is a deadly serious concept. Put broadly, it means that all parts of society should be treated equally under environmental law, or that everyone has the right to the same protection from pollution and other harm from emissions.
When an exploding star led to the observation of supernova SN 2003fg in 2003, it was nicknamed the ‘Champagne Supernova’ due to its unusual brightness, and its inexplicably great mass. Many supernovae eventually succumb to their own weight, leaving behind a black hole. Are we at this stage with battery electric vehicles (BEVs)?
Emissions testing is usually preoccupied by testing for known, worrisome chemicals in the environment. Often they are in small amounts or concentrated at hotspots. Sophisticated equipment is deployed to find and measure them. We obsess with ever-tighter regulation of these pollutants we know about, even well beyond the point of diminishing environmental returns.
Euro 7 has finally arrived - As the saying goes, a ‘good’ landing is one from which you can walk away, but a ‘great’ landing is one after which they can use the plane again. Euro 7 has not just landed safely, but the craft that is the European system of emissions regulation remains viable. It required a deft touch. The industry says it is too tough and environmental campaigners say it is too weak in equal measure, which perhaps reflects the achievement.
We know, from earlier research, that tyres emit lots of particles, both coarser and the more potentially dangerous ultrafines. To put this in context, the levels are less than from exhausts of many older diesel vehicles without filters, but orders of magnitude greater than from the exhausts of modern internal combustion engine vehicles with the latest filters. But, where do these particles go, and can they be found in the environment?
The evidence clearly points to using full hybrid electric vehicles (FHEVs) as the best route to rapid, low-risk decarbonisation of cars and vans for the next decade. FHEVs cannot deliver the biggest aggregate reduction in principle, but with scarce battery resources and higher manufacturing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions of battery electric vehicles (BEV), FHEVs can deliver more CO2 reduction now, and potentially for some time to come.
By some distance, the research Emissions Analytics published in early 2020 claiming that tire particulate wear emissions were 1,000 times worse than exhaust emissions generated the most feedback of any subject we have tackled so far – feedback that was a mixture of surprise and scepticism
That’s 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 exhaust emissions particles that are due to be emitted in the United States that don’t need to be. How? A large majority of European and Chinese cars are now sold with tailpipe particle filters, known as gasoline particulate filters (GPFs) or diesel particulate filters (DPFs) in the industry, but this is not the case in the US.
