EVs DO NOT EMIT MORE PM
Recently @OECD published a report about particulate matter (PM) from road transport. Newspaper headlines blared that electric vehicles where worse than combustion vehicles. That conclusion was wrong according to the report itself.
Let me show you.
The table comparing electric and combustion engines is on page 92. I took averages of low and high values to get the graph in the first tweet.
We have ignored this problem for too long, and there's more here than simply exhaust!
1) Electric vehicle weight
It estimates batteries at 10 kg/kWh when in reality it's already below half of that. So it makes electric vehicles much too heavy and doesn't take into account that in 2030 they will be much lighter still.
We know that the stuff that comes out of the exhaust pipe is really bad for your health.
How that compares to sand and rubber from the road (gram for gram and particle for particle) is still completely unclear. They state this clearly themselves.
But how much is how bad and what is the impact of particle size? For the stuff that's not from the exhaust we basically have no idea.
We know particles emitted from the road and the wheels of cars make us sick but that's about it. More research is urgently needed so we can avoid millions of deaths.
By switching to electric vehicles we are probably eliminating some of the most harmful emissions (from tailpipes and brake pads).
We could try to make tires more wear resistant (probably not a top priority of manufacturers).
We can construct roads in a way that traps part of the particles or we might even vacuum them up before they are released out into the open.https://t.co/mxA62vhuDG
