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.
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.
lol does $3 even buy you one small black coffee at Starbucks? I think it’s close to $5 for anything on their menu.
Watch out, though. That coffee may contain chemicals known to the state of California to cause birth defects or other reproductive harm!
Actually, Prop 65 specifically exempts coffee from the warning requirement.
I have seen that goofy warning in SBUX stores, for whatever it's worth haha (not on the coffee cup).
Kinda my problem with that label: you have no idea what's it about when you see that label. The spectrum of what got that label is so broad that it's not very useful IMO.
Coffee specifically used require Prop65 warning because it releases acrylamide during roasting process, but after a lenghty legal battle coffee got an exeption.
The overly broad selection and vague wording was done intentionally by chemical manufacturer lobbyists to muddy the waters when it was obvious Prop 65 (or something equivalent) was likely to pass. There is a lot of this kind of last minute sabotage in California props.
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.
It absolutely has good aspects, no doubt, but nothing about this is unquestionable. It’s significantly grayer due to all kinds of second order effects, even if you really believe in the problem and want to solve it.
Depends on how many more accidents worse-gripping tires cause that result in more totaled vehicles that require replacement and what people replace them with.
Depends on how much faster people have to replace these tires due to wear resulting in more baseline tire production.
Depends on how many more one-off flat tires people get that require getting a whole new set of 4 matched tires so their diffs aren’t destroyed.
Depends on whether slightly more efficient tires induce people to drive more on net because they feel like they’re using less gas.
Depends on this does or doesn’t affect how much tire material ends up in the environment and landfills.
There are so many levers one can pull on the “put less CO2 into the atmosphere” problem that it’s not at all clear that this one specific policy is worth it.
There’s also plenty of ways to make your point without stereotyping.
You have started out with the assumption that these higher efficiency tires are worse gripping. However, the article states that the manufacturer-supplied tires are generally more efficient (in order to get the milage numbers they advertise), and that it is the third-party replacements that are worse.
So either the manufacturer-supplied originals are more dangerous than replacement tires, or your argument is missing something.
The rest of your quasi-questions all would need to be evaluated to see if they are true or not... and one would hope that at least some of them were evaluated when creating the policy. You seem to be assuming they were not, without any real evidence one way or the other.
> So either the manufacturer-supplied originals are more dangerous than replacement tires
There's 3 main components to tire performance: efficiency, grip and longevity. OEM tires optimize for the first. They can compromise on grip and longevity. Most often I've experienced is the latter. So yes, OEM tires are "worse" in some aspects as replacements.
> You have started out with the assumption that these higher efficiency tires are worse gripping.
Generally speaking, with tires you are trading off wear, grip, efficiency, and cost, among other things (like off-road durability which is irrelevant here). When you make a tire roll more efficiently, it tends to make it perform worse at gripping the road in all sorts of conditions, especially adverse conditions like rain and snow. I am speaking in generalities because there are thousands of tires from dozens of manufacturers and this is not a law of physics, but it is generally true in practice. Tires today are worlds better than tires of 50 years ago but this is still true to a first approximation.
So yes, I am making that assumption.
> So either the manufacturer-supplied originals are more dangerous than replacement tires, or your argument is missing something.
The tires that come on your car from the factory are optimized for one thing and one thing only: for the OEM to sell you the car.
OEM tires are famously (infamously?) often worse in terms of wear and grip than the equivalent tire available aftermarket because they are cheaper to produce (bringing down sticker price), roll more efficiently (helping them hit EPA fuel economy numbers), and quieter on test drives. Having a cheaper tire that is quieter on test drives and hits EPA numbers that are competitive with comparable models helps sell the car.
Higher treadwear doesn't help the OEM sell the car because your test drive isn't long enough to drive the car for 60,000 miles let alone 600. Higher grip doesn't either, as average buyers won't notice tire grip on a 15 minute drive on dry pavement and enthusiasts will replace the tires anyway. With the exception of certain enthusiast vehicles, if running a cheaper tire from the factory gets the price of the car from $40,000 to $39,950, the OEM will do it, even if the buyer has to replace the tire 20,000 miles sooner and it doesn't grip as well on dry pavement or in rain or snow.
> The rest of your quasi-questions all would need to be evaluated to see if they are true or not... and one would hope that at least some of them were evaluated when creating the policy. You seem to be assuming they were not, without any real evidence one way or the other.
I'm not sure what makes my questions "quasi", I'm just having a friendly conversation about tires on the internet.
There's almost nothing in human history with a worse record of causing unintended consequences than government regulation, even well-intentioned (cookie banners?), so I think I say charitably with some basis in historical fact that governments have a spotty record when it comes to understanding and predicting the second-order effects of the regulations they make. I ask my questions with that understanding. And I say all this as someone who is broadly sympathetic to and often in favor of many government regulations that reduce CO2 emissions and make cars more efficient. I enjoy clean air as much as the next person.
These are all valid questions
but:
> Depends on how many more accidents worse-gripping tires cause
The US has an unusually high number of road deaths: https://archive.cdc.gov/www_cdc_gov/media/releases/2016/p070... and a lot of them are preventable. 1% less traction (or what ever it might be) is unlikely to be as bad compared to drink driving or not using seatbelts.
Valid point, I will grant that. It's also entirely possible that accidents due to less grippy tires are not evenly distributed (for example, due to climate or geography) and that slightly worse traction is less of a problem for most of California's urban population in particular.
Exactly.
Especially "how many more accidents worse-gripping tires cause that result in more totaled vehicles". Forget about the totaled vehicles.
Worse-gripping tires are guaranteed to cause more deaths, all else equal.
So you’re saying there are a million factors that could (and arguably should) be researched, documented and actions taken based on facts revealed.
You’re not wrong, but you’re arguing against yourself. The article is EXACTLY the kind of action that comes from research with the goal of improving the status quo, and you don’t like it.
So you actually don’t want any effort to improve things, you just want to poo poo any efforts.
Discount tire estimates 70% of the current tire options will be illegal to sell in CA. Millions of people will be pushed into different tires than they have based on a limited list of options.
Many of those as alternative tires will wear out faster, causing increased particulate pollution and wasting people's money.
Many of those tires will cost more money than they save in gas. The limited options on less common sizes will make tires really expensive for some unfortunate folks.
Some of those tires will have less grip than what people otherwise would have bought, causing some additional number of car accidents. That's money and resources wasted on wrecked cars, not to mention injuries, and potentially even deaths.
But it could save people $3/month on gas according to the optimistic numbers the lobbyists calculated, so consequences be damned, you think everyone who doesn't want this is a selfish jerk.
> Discount tire estimates 70% of the current tire options will be illegal to sell in CA. Millions of people will be pushed into different tires than they have based on a limited list of options.
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
100% of leaded gasoline became illegal. Outcome? Huge health benefits.
100% of lead paint became illegal. Outcome? Huge health benefits.
100% of new vehicles without catalytic converters, air bags, backup cameras , abs, reaction control became illegal. Outcome? Massive health and safety benefits.
The whole point of making the old way of doing something illegal is to force the better way. This is good.
Except there are clear health hazards likely to happen from this change, such as increased tire particulates, and the nominal improvement (co2) is such a diffuse hazard (with limited direct health consequences) that it is likely to get lost in the noise.
Unfortunately I agree with this.
For example, CA has very strict environment protection laws and many people hate it.
But it's also the reason we get beautiful sky and nature all year round. When I was first landing on US soil in LA in 2015, I saw a layer of light gray smog out of the window. These days it's non-existent.
I live in SF, California. I think the cleaner gasoline laws are a good thing. Driving a car that emits a high volume of cancer-causing chemicals is obviously bad for everyone. For example, benzene, a cancer-causing chemical, is reduced by ~50% in CA gasoline vs Federal regulations. That's a good thing.
But that doesn't make the tire efficiency rules, as stated, a good idea, as I pointed out above. Less grippy tires -> more car crashes and more human deaths.