EVs causing potholes ?

[SteveW]

Our EV (MG4) is less than 15% heavier than our Zafira.

Many years ago, Tomorrows World showed a test, which revealed that one badly loaded 32-tonner did as much damage as 125,000 cars.

[Paul]

One of the insults the battery needs protection from, is being penetrated from the road side.

While that's a bit of over-reaction, it's also a bit of marketing. The other car companies, this is just one of many design issues. The titanium plate was "part of the theater involved".

Some electric vehicles, the battery slab is considered a structural component. They're not wasting the rigidity they're adding, and they're making it do additional work. But the techniques for doing this, are turning the car into a "throwaway item". Some companies have a better grip on this, than others. They're doing structural at the module level. A bad module can still be replaced, but it's not going to be easy. Whereas others, their assembly method is one-time-only and has no repair strategy at all. (All the materials are bonded together.)

Paul

[SteveW]

No, that's just VED, not an equivalent to fuel duty.

[Jethro_uk]

Electric *buses* can take off like a jet ....

[SteveW]

Or MG4 is less than 15% heavier than our Zafira, that should have little effect on any properly built and maintained road.

Yes, it's acceleration is better, but not exessive ... and how often do you suddenly floor a car, from standstill, in normal driving?

[Tim+]

Yes. There’s an adjustable pedal on the floor to the right of the brake pedal.

Tim

[Clive Page]

Yes, but when the bicycle gets to the far side of the pothole (assuming that the rider hasn't been thrown off) then the road surface only has to lift a load of about 100 kg, whereas when a 2 ton car gets to the other side the road surface has to lift most of 2 tons. It may be that for a continuous good-quality smooth surface the damage difference isn't great, but when you encounter a very rough potholed road the heavier vehicle obviously does a lot more damage.

[Ian Jackson]

I remember the trolleybuses of the 1950s and early 60s. They could certainly have a pretty rapid take-off.

[Colin Bignell]

Unclassified roads, such as residential streets, would have been built to suit the traffic of the day and since then have usually had little more maintenance than the occasional replacement of the wearing surface. My road was built in 1931. How do your cars compare for weight with cars from the 1930s?

[Rod Speed]

NY [e-mail] wrote

That's what the accelerator does, no a start by start basis.

And there is with any EV car too, what the wheel motors can do.

But is limited to what the wheel motors can do.

No, but they do all still have accelerators. And even self driving cars and cruise controls which still work right down to stop start driving like some Honda's do still do smooth starts, they dont drive like a stupid kid on steroids at the stop lights.

Yeah, much easier to control the wheel motors. And you need to too, particularly so you dont get wheel spin in wet weather.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Many years ago I lived on a 4 mile long cul-de-sac where the only traffic was the half dozen people who lived on it, tractors, combine harvesters and 30 tonne sugar beet and potato haulers.

There was a slight dip in the otherwise flat road at one point. Over the ten years that I lived there it got deeper and deeper and moved outbound from the farms, in the direction the laden sugar beet trucks were travelling.

I think after I left they must have done something about it.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Many cars have fly by wire throttles. Mine certainly does and its a pain sometimes as it refuses to go until its changed gear and got some momentum in the turbo.

[SteveW]

They probably compare pretty well with narrow wheeled carts and the remaining solid tyred wagons - especially steam wagons.

[SteveW]

It is still 100kg on a narrow tyre, compared to 1600kg, spread over four wheels and each wheel being a lot wider.

[Theo]

There are typically different profiles like Eco and Sport that set acceleration, regen, suspension and other parameters, especially if the car has multiple 'personalities' - eg highway driving, sports car or off road features.

Theo

[Colin Bignell]

Those would be using the same roads as today's HGVs and those roads are not expected to cause any problems. It is country lanes and residential roads that they are worried about. Simply looking at my own vehicle history shows the way that vehicle weights have grown. My first car, a medium sized saloon, made in 1959, weighed about 16cwt. By the 1970s, I was driving a Triumph 2.5pi, which was a big car for its day and that weighed in at 1.2 tonnes. My current vehicle is half a tonne heavier than that. Your MG4 may only be 15% heavier that your Zafira, but they are both a lot heavier than the cars these roads were built for and that

15% could be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

[Spike]

Think of load per unit area, rather than load. And we were speaking of the mechanism of generating potholes, not of making existing potholes worse.

[SteveW]

But they are also on much wider and larger tyres, with far greater contactr patches.

[The Natural Philosopher]

No. The whole FUNCTION of a road is in fact to transfer load per unit area to load *over a much bigger area.*

Your thinking is as erroneous as comparing the force a train wheel exerts on a rail with the force the sleeper exerts on the ballast or the ballast on the ground underneath...

Road deformation is pretty much a function of axle loading, since the two (or four) wheels are close enough to combine forces to literally bend the road enough to crack it.

Then water gets in, freezes, and you have a pothole. Once the surface has gone the substrate is porous and freezes again and cracks up some more.

[The Natural Philosopher]

In the context of potholes, this is completely irrelevant