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- Hacker News
- Typically, there's a trade-off between rolling resistance/energy efficiency and traction/low noise. It's very easy to make long-lasting, efficient tires that are unsafe. It's difficult to make them both categories and quiet.
Maybe single occupancy personal vehicles are wasteful and mass transportation should be invested in rather than shaming individual into token behaviors compared to large-scale waste and consumption sources elsewhere in the economy?
- > Maybe single occupancy personal vehicles are wasteful and mass transportation should be invested in rather than shaming individual
no amount of shaming will make me not consider my family's safety. mass transit in CA (eg: https://www.opportunitynowsv.org/blog/nobody-feels-comfortab...) is not safe due to lack of serious policing. my family is prohibited from taking mass transit in usa. It is ok in japan and singapore.
by dmitrygr - Probably the weirdest thing about this is the state doing something that results in it getting less tax money. This was lobbied for by the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Union of Concerned Scientists.by winrid
- I assume you mean about buying less (taxed) gas.
Never fear, California is also talking about shifting to a mileage baded road tax because EVs (which they heavily incentivized) saving money on gas can't go untaxed.
by parineum - When WA launched the CCA , claiming it would cost only pennies, it ended up costing a lot more per tank. The claimed emissions reduction was very large, and the actual reduction was negligible.
This program claims 2 MMT reduction per year, but that assumes 100% adoption , after they move past the voluntary restrictions , into mandatory restrictions, and will eventually require on-road tread enforcement.
Are you okay with being pulled over for the wrong tread? it's annoying enough to face snow chains enforcement.
The only way to reach 100% adoption is with highway tread enforcement. Like we do for highway emissions enforcement.
What do you think they will use the Flock cameras for?
by tonymet - "...adopt a replacement tire efficiency program “designed to ensure that replacement tires sold in the state are at least as energy efficient, on average, as tires sold in the state as original equipment on new passenger cars and light-duty trucks.” Replacement tires are those purchased by drivers to replace existing tires."
Tires are not car-specific. This sounds like you couldn't just go out and buy some random tires, you could only buy tires that are designated for your specific vehicle. And that owners of two vehicles with the same size tires would have different allowed tire choices, depending on what their OEM tires were.
Put another way, is this saying you can't buy wider than OEM tires, and that you can't buy all-terrain tires for something that came with street tires?
by diggernet - It's "on average", so no, you still can.
And what are they gonna do if you just go to the tire store and say I want X tires? So of course none of this will be enforced. It's just to provide the little leaf indicator.
by winrid - I would like to see a rule added that requires embedding a uuid for each tire so if you litter it, or your trucking company loses a re-tread, the state can chase you down and bill you, even years later. Upon selling a vehicle or replacing tires, your name is taken off the liability list and transferred to the new owner or shop. The retreads alone cost the state quite a bit and are dangerous to remove from the traffic lanes.by gosub100
- Do TPMSs have uuids? Although I suppose it would just be a matter of time until Flock tracks those too, if they don't alreadyby Rebelgecko
- Which will just mean that people stop tossing them places they're easy to see and instead throw them into bodies of water or holes in the ground.
You wanna stop people littering tires, make it easy/cheap to get rid of them the right way. Pretty much all the problems in the municipal solid waste industry trace back to some shortsighted "environmentalists" trying to financially punish people for not behaving how they prefer, distorting the market and thereby keeping various types of waste from getting into the hands of the relevant disposal industries.
- Fine, but in that case the trucking companies should also be able to bill the state for all damage caused to their vehicles by badly maintained roads. Maybe every pothole should have an ID so that damage caused by it can be traced back and billed to the state responsible for managing that part of the road?
Better still, have rules about maintenance for both roads as well as vehicles, use regular (yearly, past-the-winter-season for roads) inspections and deal with those who do not abide by the rules by (for vehicles) denying road access until problems have been mitigated or (for roads) deductions in road taxes or something similar, something to make it costly for the state to evade their responsibility. Fines don't work here since they'll just increase taxes to pay them, they need to lose funds to at least the amount of what it would have cost to fix the problems.
by hagbard_c - I’d be much more interested in particulate pollution limits for tires.
- How much of this is a solvable problem, insofar to the best of my knowledge there is no fundamental workaround for the fact placing heavy objects moving fast on rough surfaces generates friction which leads to the erosion of surfaces?
I think particulate pollution would be an acceptable outcome if the tires themselves were biodegradable over 10+ years. But to my understanding the vulcanisation process that's employed makes it impossible.
by lukeify - California has about 30 millions cars. $1B total fuel savings are … $33 per year, for a whooping less than $3 of fuel savings per car, per month. Thing of all the places you can go with that extra half a gallon, all the work you can accomplish with that large SBUX coffee. It’s all totally worth it.by raspasov
- lol does $3 even buy you one small black coffee at Starbucks? I think it’s close to $5 for anything on their menu.by Dig1t
- Your comment perfectly encapsulates the American thought process (I’m coming from the universal healthcare discussion on the front page)
You post numbers that this will save $1B in fuel. Tons of co2 equal to taking 400,000 cars off the road.
Unquestionably good for society, immensely good for future generations, but you ridicule it because it doesn’t benefit YOU enough right now.
This is why the US doesn’t have nice things. You really can’t see past yourself.
by testing22321 - If the tires wear out even 10% sooner, the entire environmental case goes out the window. I had eco tires on my Volt and they never lasted as long as they were supposed to.by dj_gitmo
- TIL we have LED lightbulb rules but every bulb in home depot has terrible PWM that's bad for your eyes.
Another 20 years and maybe the government will finally address that.
On the tires topic, I'm fine with this as long as they don't ban the sale of anything. Let the consumer decide.
by winrid - Can you get LED lightbulbs you like online?by Schiendelman
- I replaced all the bulbs in my house with incandescents.
They use more electricity, but I don't really care. If we're going to build ten thousand gigawatt datacenters for every corporation on earth to stuff AI up my ass I will do as I please with the lighting in my own home and I rest easy about it, because of the very pleasant, warm, full spectrum glow that incandescents give off when dimmed.
by mlsu - https://flickeralliance.org/ will help you find good quality bulbsby kingnothing
- Too bad they didn't just require manufacturers to publish a rolling resistance efficiency score for tires, like the EU does, rather than a mandate with so many unintended consequences and loopholes. (That would be especially effective at influencing consumer behavior if paired with higher carbon fees.)by angiolillo
- Manufacturers should be forced to publish basically everything about the products they introduce into the market. Freedom of information laws should apply to large manufacturers.by scotty79
My nose for unintended consequences says manufacturers could start selling cars with worse tires to bring down the average....“designed to ensure that replacement tires sold in the state are at least as energy efficient, on average, as tires sold in the state as original equipment.”That being said, the quoted figures do sound good. Maybe less compelling in someplace like Texas with very low gas prices:
The energy commission calculated that more efficient tires cost between $6 and $26 more per set, but that increase is more than offset by reduced fuel consumption. It put net savings at $85 to $153 over the lifetime of the tire when gasoline is $4.60 a gallon, though the savings could be 25 percent higher with this year’s price spikes.by 3eb7988a1663- the original tires on my 2016 mazda 6 I bought new from a dealer in California were quite bad. Dunlop something. Bad on wet, okay on dry, lasted for short time. Replaced them after 2 years if I recall correctly. I wonder if original tires are any better 10 years later...by Gabrys1
- These calculations cannot possibly be true. That extra cost is way too small when tires have such a wide range of prices.by roksprok
- >My nose for unintended consequences says manufacturers could start selling cars with worse tires to bring down the average.
They already do. They mostly do it for handling and NVH though. And tire makers compete pretty seriously to be the OEM tire on a given car because it's a guaranteed-ish number of sales plus subsequent sales from all the people who just buy the same thing because clearly those work fine why think about it.
- > My nose for unintended consequences says manufacturers could start selling cars with worse tires to bring down the average.
They won't want to do that because it'll hurt their advertised mileage/range.
This is aimed at the different incentives between selling tires to manufacturers (make sure mileage is good, balance that against raw cost) vs direct to consumers (up front cost is king).
There are doubtless still some potential loopholes that will be explored, though some of the most obvious (like reducing tread depth, mentioned here, appear to have been considered already: https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a71509031/california-tire-... ). It doesn't appear to be that naive.
It's also something that's hard to find info on when shopping for tires, so more transparency should help consumers.
by majormajor - > manufacturers could start selling cars with worse tires to bring down the average.
OEMs do the opposite already because their official MPG ratings are calculated using the OE tires. OE tires are sometimes criticized as prioritizing fuel economy too much at the expense of longevity and performance.
I don’t see a reason that a car manufacturer would be incentivized to help tire manufacturers sell the cheapest tires on the market
by kube-system - The EU has been using a single mandatory tire-label system that has an "efficiency" category, among others, so that you can see the tradeoffs, since 2021.
But of course, the EU is over-regulated, let's laugh at the EU :-)
by jwr