EVs causing potholes ?

[Fredxx]

Are you saying the stress placed on a road doesn't matter when it comes to forming potholes?

Did you do a course in art perchance? Engineering is certainly not your forte.

[Colin Bignell]

The concern expressed was about the weight, not the ground pressure. However, the ground pressure is roughly the pressure in the tyres. My first car had a tyre pressure of 20psi. The 2.5PI was 24psi and my current car is 32psi.

[The Natural Philosopher]

My first had 30 psi. Currently its 32.

But irrelevant to potholes

[Colin Bignell]

A Challenger 2 tank has about 40% of the ground pressure of my car, but I doubt it would do my road a lot of good if one ever drove down it.

[Colin Bignell]

That will only affect the wearing layer. Potholes are formed by faults deeper in the road structure.

[Andrew]

And there are now well over 30 million cars on the road and a similar increase in HGV's which are now 44 tonnes too (plus a lot of overweight ones sneaking across from Ireland to the EU via UK roads) and people are driving much higher mileages in their cars to commute to distant employment.

There were plenty of old B&W films on TV over christmas (and every day on TPTV) where the lack of cars on the roads of places like London is quite a reminder.

[Rod Speed]

The roads weren't built for the weight of the current cars at the time.

They were always built for the trucks seen at the time, even with unregulated roads because they used to have trucks delivering coal and then later heating oil etc and removal vans and cranes etc for some building work and trucks loaded with bricks etc.

Nope, roads don't work like that.

[Rod Speed]

No its not when considering if some types of CARS produce more potholes than others.

[Rod Speed]

He is essentially saying that its the axle load that bends and cracks the road surface and lets water in. While that is true with trucks, it isnt true of cars.

His problem has always been ear to ear dog shit, not any course he did.

[Rod Speed]

It isnt the tire pressure that cracks the road surface and lets the water in and produces the pot hole.

And truck tires are much higher pressure than car tires.

[Rod Speed]

The damage tanks do to a road has nothing to do with the ground pressure, the problem is downward facing ridges that are there to prevent the entire track from sliding over the ground, particularly when not proceeding in an straight line.

[Rod Speed]

Nope, they are caused by the top surface of the road cracking and letting water into the substructure of the road. Once bits of the top surface break off to form a hole, that fills with water an the sub structure gravel gets pumped out by tires going into the hole and pumping it out with the water.

[Colin Bignell]

Which was the point I was making about the concern being the weight, rather than the ground pressure.

[Colin Bignell]

When I lived in London, our coal was delivered by horse and cart.

[Colin Bignell]

That would only be superficial damage to the wearing surface. The 62 tonnes weight would be affecting the layers below that.

[Rod Speed]

But it isnt the weight of the CAR that cracks the road surface.

[Rod Speed]

And the wheels of the cart would have been much more like to crack the road surface than a truck of that era.

[Rod Speed]

Nope, its the cracks that let the water that erodes the underlying packed fine gravel.

Nope, that's not what produces pot holes. That fine gravel layer has already been compacted by the roller before the top waterproof layer is applied.

[Colin Bignell]

The top layer on British roads is simply there to take wear. The much thicker layer below that is also waterproof, either asphalt or concrete, and the compacted MOT* is below that.

• A mix of different materials to Ministry Of Transport specifications.

[Rod Speed]

That is just plain wrong. Its actually there to stop water getting into the underlying packed gravel which is much deeper.

Have fun spelling out how you get a pothole in that.