It’s impossible to deny that electric vehicles have no direct tailpipe emissions – they don’t have tailpipes. The claim that they produce more brake dust emissions is also easy to debunk, because EVs employ regenerative braking, and most don’t need new pads for years. But since they are heavier and have more torque, electric cars do tend to go through tires more quickly. I asked Gunnlaugur Erlendsson, founder and CEO of EV tire specialist ENSO, just how big the issue is and how it can be solved.
“It’s not a small problem, even without electric cars on the road,” says Erlendsson. “This is backed by Defra (UK Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs) and by Imperial College, in a report that was recently flagged in an article in The Guardian. Tires were already a problem, but when we switch to electric cars, according to Michelin, we increase tire wear by up to 20%. According to Goodyear, it’s up to 50%. This is validated also in other research that we’ve seen.”
“This is the reason we set up ENSO, to tackle the environmental impacts of tires, air and microplastic pollution,” continues Erlendsson. “No tire will last forever, but we can make them a lot better than they are made today. Carmakers can engineer vehicles to reduce tire wear, they can make them less heavy, reduce the torque or change the size of the tire. However, while the tire on a new vehicle has been engineered with the OEM’s approval, there’s no control what happens in the aftermarket.”
The current laws that apply to tires globally revolve around safety rather than environmental concerns. Now the entire automotive industry is realigning around emissions and sustainability, tires lag behind. “The tire industry hasn’t moved at the pace that the electric vehicle industry needs it to,” says Erlendsson. “When tire makers sell tires to the carmakers, they make very little profit. They make almost all the profit in the aftermarket. Their version of growth is to sell more tires, so they don’t want them to last too long. Also, new cars are still a very small minority of all the vehicles we have on the planet. So even where we have high concentration of EV sales, such as Norway, they’re still only a small percentage of cars on the road.”
ENSO has therefore built a model around direct customer sales and environmental credentials. The company is the only tire maker to receive B Corp certification for its social and environmental performance. This places it in the same league as Patagonia and Body Shop. However, while the top five corporations produce half the tires globally, half of sales are made by independent shops outside the control of the tire industry. Many of these retailers are online.
“The tire industry hasn’t adopted its own direct sales models due to complexity and not wanting to cannibalize their distribution systems,” says Erlendsson. However, as we switch to EVs, the tire market has fundamentally changed. “You can buy an E-Class Mercedes with up to 30 different tire sizes, but you can only buy a Tesla with three. As soon as you shift away from the most efficient one, which usually has the smallest diameter like the 18in for the Tesla Model 3, up to the 19in or 20in tire, you radically reduce the range. You could lose 10%, sometimes even more. When you buy a fossil fuel car, you don’t lose so much range.”
One reason for this is due to the much better overall efficiency of battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) compared to internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. “BEVs can be 90% efficient, but ICE is more like 30%,” says Erlendsson. “That means that an electric vehicle is three times more efficient than ICE, so when I put a better tire on an electric car, I get three times more additional range than I would if I put the same tire on an ICE car. This is why in the past people have bought special rims, because it doesn’t reduce fuel consumption so much. The car is so inefficient anyway. You put a better tire or a worse tire on an EV you get three times the impact, either good or bad. When the car is hungry for energy-efficient tires, this means you get a much bigger bang for your buck with your choice.”
There is a similar explanation for why driving at high speed or towing a caravan seems to reduce the range of BEVs so much more than ICE. If energy consumption goes up with the extra drag from a trailer or excessive velocity, the effect is three times as much with a BEV. “We need to make tires as energy efficient as possible for EVs,” says Erlendsson. ENSO has trialed its tires with DPD and Royal Mail in London, showing 10% more range on electric vehicles versus benchmark tires. “This paid for the cost of the tires. The tires were effectively free.”
Although mainstream tire firms are developing EV tires, often these are rebranded versions of existing models, with no fundamental shift in design. Erlendsson argues that we need to reduce tire production down from 2 billion per year, whereas if Goodyear’s figures are correct, the shift to EVs will increase the volume to 3 billion. “We need to be producing somewhere close to 1 billion tires per year and that requires a technology leap,” he argues. “But there’s a commercial business hurdle. How does a company like Michelin remain profitable?”
Making a more robust, more energy efficient and more durable tire hits margins. This is even more problematic when you don’t control the distribution model. For online retailers, the incentive is to sell cheaper products that are more profitable. “The relationship between the tire manufacturer and the tire distributors is ultimately what sways the market,” says Erlendsson. He argues that Tesla’s disruption via a vertically integrated business model is what is needed in the tire industry as well. “The number of tire sizes has dropped substantially with the advent of electric vehicles. There’s only one size that’s the most efficient and people gravitate to that size. The complexity of the market is disappearing, but price per unit demand is getting higher. This is why ENSO was built to be vertically integrated, supplying customers directly, while still making a profit.”
“Our products improve the range of the vehicle, reduce pollution, and cost around 10% less than the benchmark,” says Erlendsson. The company has started selling to fleets in London, but aims to extend its business to California soon, starting with taxis and delivery vans, which often change their tires multiple times per year. When these companies switch to BEVs, all the costs go down except for tires, which go up by as much as 30%. Once businesses have worked out how to charge a fleet of EVs, economizing on tire usage is the next problem they want to solve. The greater distances travelled in the US make it an even bigger issue there.
“America does not have any rating on its tires to tell you if they’re efficient or not,” says Erlendsson. “Your only guarantee of not losing range on your Tesla today is to go to the Tesla garage and get your tires replaced there. Otherwise, you don’t know you will get the same product. There’s no labeling system to guarantee that. No tire will last forever. It will generate wear, and with EVs it’s 20% to 50% more. With our testing with Royal Mail and DPD on our first-generation product, we showed that we could reduce this by up to 35%. This brings the level below where the general market is today. Tires can do even better than the status quo, so we shouldn’t worry about tire pollution so long as we have a robust understanding and avoid the false economy of buying cheap tires and buying them often.”
“Tire pollution is very serious,” says Erlendsson. “We’re exposed to more PM 2.5 and PM 10 dust from tires than tailpipes, but where’s the regulation against that? The Euro 7 regulation is flawed because it only applies to new vehicles, not the tire aftermarket. It’s also flawed because the level will probably be put where it will be easy for the top tier tire manufacturers to achieve. They cannot even agree today how they’re going to create the tire wear mechanism measurements, nor where the level of the pass-fail will be set. So unlike energy efficiency and safety or noise, there’s no rating. It’ll either be good or bad, but it’ll only be good or bad for new vehicles. It won’t take care of the problem for the aftermarket, which is 80% of the volume. So we’re still going to be faced with cheap imports of inferior products.”
“Ultimately, altruism is great, but you need to make it profitable,” concludes Erlendsson. “If the raw materials for more efficient tires are fundamentally more expensive, you can only pivot to these materials if you change the underlying business model. The top tiers choose not to do this because it’s not economic for them to do so, rather than because it’s technologically challenging. They don’t do it because they can’t make it as profitable as the current status quo.”
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