California's new tire efficiency rules could save drivers $1B a year
grist.org117 points by littlexsparkee 18 hours ago
117 points by littlexsparkee 18 hours ago
There are basically three major trade-off when it comes to tire compounds: rolling resistance, traction, and tire wear. You can pick 2 of the 3.
When you shop for tires, manufacturers will try to make this eminently clear in the marketing - you pay a premium for tires that maximize on one or two of these features.
The changes that California is proposing basically means you are going to have to choose between traction and tire wear when shopping. Either super slippery tires, or tires that wear out quickly (hence why manufacturers are potentially behind the proposal).
> The rule also comes with exemptions including snow tires and those used in competition. All-weather tires are also excluded, but the state will track them, as that growing segment may be regulated in the future.
All-Weathers are excluded! Realistically this is a program that would only be effective in California.
Yes, there are trade-offs, but you can get really great tires on all three. The Michelin CrossClimate2 tires are arguably the best traction tires, Consumer Reports estimates 95,000 miles of tread life in their testing (higher than basically anything else), and they got a 4/5 for rolling resistance on Consumer Reports' dynamometer testing.
There's a lot of tires that are poorly made and just bad tires. For example, one tire got 2/5 for rolling resistance, tested to 55,000 miles for tread, and 2/5 and 3/5 ratings for the traction categories like wet braking, snow traction, ice braking.
I'm not arguing that there aren't trade-offs, but tire companies have been working to make better tires that minimize the trade-offs and produce better tires on all three.
> The rule is “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.”
It sounds like the rule isn't exactly that strict. This (combined with the fact that all season tires aren't covered) presents a very low bar. But there are tires that are just garbage - they're bad at all three. It doesn't sound like this rule would impact good tires that have very long tread life and amazing traction. It sounds like it'd impact the tires that are a pile of garbage.
There's a difference between a tire that trades off a small portion of rolling resistance for traction and tire wear and tires that are poorly made and are trading off a huge amount of one or two of those categories because they're just bad tires.
> The Michelin CrossClimate2 tires are arguably the best traction tires,
In their class, but not in general.
They are all-season tires. They don't perform as well as winter tires in the winter, and they don't perform as well as summer tires in the summer.
They're also a terribly mushy tire. They feel like you're floating around on the road and wallowing through the turns. This doesn't matter in the slightest to someone commuting to work in their 15 year old Honda Accord with blown struts, but if you enjoy driving they're on the list of tires to avoid.
Everything is a tradeoff. Some tires do a better job of optimizing within their class, but the Michelin CC2 is assuredly not the best traction tires in general.
>They don't perform as well as winter tires in the winter, and
A lot of people don't live in climates where winter tires are even sold; particularly California, Texas, Florida, three of the most populous states. Many people in those states aren't even aware "winter tires" are even a product category. That's like complaining the Walmart in Anchorage, Alaska doesn't carry SPF 50 sunscreen.
It's worth pointing out the CrossClimate2 tires are all-seasons and exempt from the requirement. The 4/5 is specific to Consumer Reports all-season category - actual efficiency is going to be noticeably lower than the high efficiency tires they are talking about in the article.
But you're not wrong in general. There are a lot of garbage tires. And that's not even considering the intentionally "bad" tires like the knobby off-road treads that also have the side effect of massively increasing road noise and reducing engine life.
But like a lot of the California rules, they have carved out so many exceptions and have no real enforcement mechanism (the worst offending tires are being imported directly from China). So the reality is that there is not going to be a lot of juice for the squeeze.
>Yes, there are trade-offs, but you can get really great tires on all three.
there is another metric at play with Michelin, they're consistently one of the most expensive options in every segment.
It's even worse than that. Rain performance and rolling resistance are conflicting goals. A good rain tire will need more voids to channel the water, but adding a lot of voids increases rolling resistance.
California is a large market. Tire manufacturers probably won't make many California-specific tires. They're going to try to adjust their tires to meet the California guidelines. The most populous areas of California aren't known for demanding a lot of rain tires.
So if you live somewhere with a lot of rain, your tire choices are about to get worse to appease regulations in a state you don't live in.
If they're looking to improve tire energy efficiency with regulation, shouldn't they also make it a citable offense to drive with tires inflated below 30psi? You could probably even train a ML algorithm to recognize images of vehicles with underinflated tires, and send the driver a reminder!
That’s probably sooner than you think.
DOTs are intercepting trucks with drones and measuring wheel temperatures and other metrics to do targeted enforcement rather than pulling over every truck. There’s also pilots of road sensors that can weigh trucks and perhaps other metrics.
Which really is just a revenue game but one with a good eough pretext you can sell it to average dumbass voter. All the "serious" overloading is non-CDL box trucks anyway and has been forever. The road scales are easily gamed, or just avoided.
> The road scales are easily gamed, or just avoided.
How are they easily gamed, without being able to shift the load as you roll over the scale?
And, at least in California, the scales are placed so that, to avoid them, you have to add a bunch of time to most routes.
Doesn't TPMS take care of that? Though, it seems like it's being done in software now to save costs...
Then people will drive around with them at 60psi (i.e. doable but not great for a car tire) and wonder why they keep breaking belts.
Hmm, I have these tires on my Model 3: https://www.contimediacenter.com/eulabel/en/03143300000/
After 15,000 km, they haven't worn down by 2 mm. And that's despite being an EV. I think it really depends on how you drive.
I wonder if better rolling resistance + decent safe traction means more tire particulate pollution.
Unless people never see any snow, I think all weather is the only choice to be made and the large tire makers all have decent offerings in the all weather category.
There are trade-offs, but there huge differences in quality between say a Michelin or Pirelli and a cheap Chinese brand.
I have a Tesla S so that means bigger tyres than most European cars so I feel the price whenever I buy tyres so I once bought some Chinese summer tyres, Triangle brand, they were half the price of the equivalent Michelin. They seemed OK but they wore out twice as fast so it didn't save any money in the end. Now I just stick to Michelin Pilot Sport 4.
Either super slippery tires, or tires that wear out quickly
Is it really not possible to get moderately-slippery tires that wear out moderately quickly, or is this just the hyperbolic writing style that infests the internet?
Yeah, it's a weird move to legislate this kind of trade-off, especially when one of the competing factors is tire wear. Making new tires takes energy too! If I was paranoid, I'd say the tire lobby was involved here and looking for an excuse to sell more lower durability tires.
This is 100% how legislation gets written when none of reps have experience and the only calls they take are from lobbyists.
It's easy to imagine the manufacturer reps are playing games with the lawmakers. "Oh no, this is going to be really hard on us! It's going to cost us so much money! But I guess we can comply if we have to."
This was 100% pushed by a lobby. Name me one legislator who has any detailed knowledge about tires, rolling resistance, traction, tread wear, and fuel economy. I guess there might be single-digit numbers of them in a state as big as CA but even there I'd be surprised.
And even if this was originated by an eco lobbiest group, tire manufactures would love regulation that forces everyone to buy more expensive tires.
Only Californians could dream up a stupid program like this and pretend that it's environmentally protective to send a ton more tire particles into the ecosystem, while costing consumers more, and probably increasing their carbon footprint at the manufacturing level, just to get shitty tires that might make a car a tiny bit more efficient.
I had a set of these low-rolling-resistance tires stock on an early FWD EV I had a few years ago and they were not only trash in terms of getting grip whenever there was even a hint of rain, but they also had awful stopping distance. Swapping them out for a set of all-weathers vastly improved everything about the car.
Consider the carbon footprint impact of a vehicle accident that totals both cars (never mind the human impact of this!). Probably cancels out hundreds of cars worth of carbon savings from using these shitty tires. Avoiding vehicle accidents has to be job one and tires are the single greatest factor in your stopping distance that you can simply buy an upgrade on. Combined with automatic braking technology - a great addition - you can seriously change the course of your life with a set that's only a couple hundred bucks more (in the sense that your life will be hella changed if you have an accident and end up with chronic pain).
Every car has powerful enough brakes, braking upgrades are mostly just for racing needs; but stock tires are still very often just total garbage and the first thing you should replace.
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.)
Two of my cars wear specialty tires, one is a citroen that uses specialty Michelin Pilot-X tires designed exclusively for Citroen (and a handful of Renault) of that era, the other wears very limited production tires designed to go on spoke rim with center nut spline hubs. Pretty concerned I am going to have to "manually import" these from Nevada as they need replacement every ~3 years.
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 :-)
IIf you’re over-regulated, you’re bound to get something right every once in a while. To over-regulate and get 100 % of regulations wrong would require someone in the system to be able to tell good from bad, aka competence.
:)
I think with regulations "right" is highly subjective and also time dependent. "Right" today is wrong tomorrow. "Right" for one group is wrong for another today and it might switch up tomorrow.
...“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.> 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
Car manufacturers watch the cost of every piece of the bill of materials. Cars compete on price, and the assortment of pieces which add perceived value to consumers. Outside of performance and very highend luxury cars, tires are an afterthought to the average car buyer.
Yes, which is why most optimize tires primarily for price, fuel economy, and NVH, because those are the things which a consumer notices the most when buying a vehicle: "what's the price, what's the EPA estimate, and did I like the test drive?"
Some manufacturers even source tires that have lower tread depths than typical replacement tires, in order to decrease noise and increase MPG at the direct detriment to tread life. Tesla is one of the manufacturers that does this, which is one exacerbating factor for their notoriously poor tire life. They literally come with less tire!
Toyota is infamous for offering special, nerfed versions of well-known tires on their new vehicles. You buy a Tacoma, you don’t get the Wildpeak AT4W, which is a very good all terrain tire. Instead, you get the Wildpeak AT4WA, which is a nerfed version with reduced tread depth that is quieter and more efficient than the real AT4W but less capable and wears out faster.
> 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.
These calculations cannot possibly be true. That extra cost is way too small when tires have such a wide range of prices.
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...
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
https://flickeralliance.org/ will help you find good quality bulbs
The linked page works fine for me, but when I navigate to any of the other pages (for example: https://flickeralliance.org/collections/flicker-free-light-b...) it just shows me an ad for an Indonesian online casino. Anyone else getting this?
This is an awesome resource, thank you for sharing. I especially love that Amazon basic bulbs are fine for the first on the list.
Can you get LED lightbulbs you like online?
Yeah, the Philips EyeComfort Flicker Free bulbs. Which HD used to sell. Now it's 90% a couple other brands.
The problem is landlords and normal people just go to home depot so every time I move it's a giant replace bulbs fiasco (or even replacing fixtures).
Sounds like the problem is HD/Lowes driving all other alternatives out of business.
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.
> insofar to the best of my knowledge there is no fundamental workaround
May I introduce you to the steel wheel rolling on a steel rail?
Not frictionless, so it will also slowly degrade over time. It just has so much mass built-in that it’s not obvious.
But, critically to the conversation we're having, does not produce harmful particulates when it does so.
The real changes are to make them less toxic! There are a bunch of approaches to take there.
"...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?
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.
It is already difficult to get most aftermarket parts in california- especially things in the combustion path. Can't even buy them off ebay.
This kind of "average" nonsense in the form of CAFE[1] standards is why we have endless SUVs and crossovers on the road now. I expect that this will lead to similar unintended consequences.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy
> A complicated 2011 mathematical formula was replaced starting in 2012 with a simpler inverse-linear formula with cutoff values.[10] CAFE footprint requirements are set up such that a vehicle with a larger footprint has a lower fuel economy requirement than a vehicle with a smaller footprint.
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.
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.
The energy efficient tires have much longer wet braking distance. And they last less (for similar priced tires).
Anyway, saying how it will save money is not right way how to promote this (it is really hard to predict all 2nd order effects this might cause - including increase of accidents, noise pollution, market forces (less choice), and similar).
EVs have low center of gravity, but their low rolling resistance tires have less lateral grip and contributed to them failing the moose test.
Context: a car magazine simulates a car swerving around a fatal obstacle in lane and then quickly getting back to their lane to avoid a head-on collision. Taller, narrower cars tip over; poor suspension/ESC rip off tires from their rims (debeading); slippery tires send it skidding. Its a great rabbit hole in Youtube.
> energy efficient tires have much longer wet braking distance
This is a labelling law, not a "You can't buy the bumpy tires" law.
This improves the quality of my choice here, because I already look for the little snowflake on tires when buying them for the 3 weekends I drive in the snow.
I'd be revolting too if they banned all season tires over this, because I am not swapping winter tires for thanksgiving weekend, Xmas and ski week.
Also efficient tires don't mean driving becomes boring, a GT86 is on skinnies and that makes it more fun at 35mph in a tight corner than a BMW with pilot sports.
I think they're only calling out cost, because the skinny tires cost more money overall, but there is a net payoff period on bills.
> This is a labelling law, not a "You can't buy the bumpy tires" law.
No, the labeling part seems to be mostly secondary:
FTA
"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"
The article seems to contradict this:
> Reducing the rolling resistance of a tire isn’t technically that difficult, said Fadie. Incorporating more silica, for example, improves not only efficiency but traction as well. Rubber chemistry and tread designs can also lead to gains
and the quoted opposition never mentions this fact either, which you'd think they would.
This. My wife and I both thought the low-rolling-resistance tires on our hybrids felt very unsafe in the rain. My Audi A3-etron's tires were also by far the least durable tires I have had on a car in my 40+ years of driving. I prematurely replaced or repaire more tires on that car in 8 years than on all the other cars I've had put together.
I eventually switched to a midsize truck, because I need to do some light towing sometimes, and my first thought was, it feels so much safer in the rain.
Once you control for tread (which you're already mostly doing by restricting the comparison to run of the mill road tires) most of how it feels in the rain comes down to tire pressure and shape of contact patch.
I had some Michelin Energy Savers on my Chevy Volt for a while. Got 25k miles out of them before they were toast. They were awful, noisy, no grip, and I didn't realize how bad they were until I got some much better tires.
Seems right to me.
So what is the right way then?
Let people buy whatever they want.
Tire wear is the largest source of micro plastic pollution and is likely the cause of a salmon population collapse in several PNW watersheds.
1. This is in California, not the PNW.
2. There are many other ways to help salmon and their habitat. If the goal is to help them, California’s massive budget could be applied in many more targeted and effective ways to helping the fish.
3. There’s no evidence that this specific piece of regulation will help salmon in any way.
Ok, does anyone have a list of these new tires that I can source from Costco?
Dual feeling about this.
Non-OEM tires are usually louder, because they trade in efficiency for noise.
OTOH I had a car that came with Michelin Super Ports and it was a much better ride on Michelin PS4S.
It cost me $1600 to change the 4 tires for my Tesla because they are “energy efficient” and matched my original tires. I do not want the tires for my other car to be this expensive. I don’t care about efficiency those tires are literally 4X the price of my other car a Honda.
I don't think it's just because they are "energy efficient". Teslas are heavy, powerful vehicles. The tires they need are usually rated for extra load (XL), and have a high speed rating (W/Y). If you went for EV tyres they likely contain an acoustic lining too as road noise is more noticeable in one. Unclear if that's really needed though. Either way it sounds like you went for premium tires which is probably the right choice for a ~400hp, 2 ton car.
My Honda’s energy efficient tires are cheap. Your Tesla tires are expensive because of their lower volume and high performance design. They have different compound and more durable construction to handle the weight and torque better, and have noise dampening inserts.
An energy efficient tire for a Honda is just a mid priced tire for a Honda, and probably cheaper to install because they likely use just a $0.50 rubber valve stem too.
They're different, yes, but not that different from the others. The price difference mostly comes from the fact that those who can afford pricey EVs also can afford pricey EV tires and as such they're priced the way they are. Once EVs come down in price to match or go below ICE-powered cars tire prices will go down as well.
The energy efficient tires for my Chevy EV are $800 for a set of 4. You're paying the luxury car parts tax.
Isnt that because it has crazy torque, AWD, and high weight?
Same thing with ebike tires vs normal bike tires
Mine are really close to needing to be replaced and I’m not looking forward to the 1500+ it’ll cost. I’ve gone further than the est lifespan at least.
you can cheaper ones. i'm shopping for them on discount tires.com and there;'s some for like 100$ per tire.
Look for low rolling resistance. chat gpt helps with this a lot
So, your Honda is worth $400?
Are the wheels a weird size? What stopped you from replacing them with regular tires?
Not the OP, but for my EV, it was a combination of higher load rating because batteries are heavy, tread compound needing to be different (more expensive) because of high torque requirements, and rolling resistance and tire noise being much more important for EVs than ICE cars.
1. Shop around, there are cheaper tyres with same specs
2. Yours probably have foam for silent operation
3. They also have higher load spec, lower rolling resistance, stronger sidewall
4. Most importantly, they are likely much wider than normal car tyre, since Tesla's are quite high performing.
since this is about fuel consumption I assume that it doesn't apply to EVs
EVs are already using tires which are optimized for low rolling resistance because when you make the car that much more efficient, smaller losses become more visible.
Energy consumption. EVs being heavier, it actually matters more for them
the energy consumption of EVs is already massively below gas vehicles. also, as others have pointed out, their tires already are within the regulations.
this regulation is about replacement tires, which people buy... EV owners could (before this) also buy tires that no longer comply with this new regulation
The staff report [0] seems pretty reasonable. Essentially manufacturers measure their tires using ISO 28580:2018 [1] and self-report to a future state tire portal. I wish that test was available when I last bought tires and look forward to seeing it next go round.
Undoubtably, consumers will quickly adopt tires in an exempt category like "Specialty tires, including certain off-road tires, low-speed tires, deep-tread tires, winter snow tires, space-saver tires, and temporary-use tires" and the unintended consequence will be that vehicle energy efficiency as a whole will decline.
> Undoubtably
We need a better argument than that.
HN are obsessed with the 'unintended consequences' argument against regulation, a very general idea applied to an actual situation, and as if people can't and don't anticipate and make effective plans.
The world turns, things work, regulations work - not everything in the world, but we accomplish a lot. My roads, medications, air traffic, etc. etc. work; people's planning and ideas succeeded.
> We need a better argument than that.
I'm not arguing for or against this consumer information regulation. It would not surprise me if most tire industry folks support it since a acknowledged standard increases consumer trust in the claims of a premium product. Good regulation creates wins for both consumers and producers.
Bad regulation typically tries to nudge either consumers or producers in a direction contrary to the prevailing culture and/or economics. To the extent that CA will attempt to reduce consumer choice, different methods will exploit the regulation's leaks, like which tires it does not cover.
A direct corollary is US fuel economy standards leading to the rise of the SUV as an vehicle format. People may disagree on causes, but "[t]here is some evidence that this happened with an increase in market share of lower fuel economy light trucks and SUVs and decline in passenger car sales, as a percentage of total fleet sales, as car buying trends changed during the 1990s. . ." [0]
Another fun example is the development of "trunking." I'm not a CA teen so lack direct experience, and things are undoubtably overhyped, but enough people started doing it for a law to be passed specifically criminalizing the practice. Why would anyone ride in the trunk of a car? Because CA outlawed passengers in cars driven by teens.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy
1. https://www.ocregister.com/2007/01/03/trunking-law-for-the-d...
what an unbelievably hostile cookie banner
Looking forward to picking up new pilot sports in Nevada.
Same. It seems like they will just give them one leaf marking and not outlaw them outright, though?
Right. If they wanted to ban things this would basically ban all knobby tires too wouldn’t it?
This is a primarily a labeling law it seems so people don’t get accidentally screwed. Seems like a good idea to me.
> Right. If they wanted to ban things this would basically ban all knobby tires too wouldn’t it?
Those will be exempt from testing/labelling.
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.
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.
Do TPMSs have uuids? Although I suppose it would just be a matter of time until Flock tracks those too, if they don't already
They have a 32 bit ID, assigned sequentially during manufacture, with no coordination among manufacturers to avoid overlap. There will certainly be collisions. Those can often be disambiguated though because there is almost no standardization of anything else about the transmission.
The closest thing to a standard is that most either operate in the 315 MHz band (which is mostly older ones in North America and Asia) or the 433 MHz band (there are restriction in Europe with the 315 MHz band). Most worldwide are now in the 433 MHz band. Tesla switched to using BLE, and others are starting to support that.
For the 433 MHz (and I'd guess 315 MHz) there is pretty much no standard beyond that. It is a lot like the situation in wireless weather sensors and other non-WiFi/non-Bluetooth IoT devices.
Different manufacturers use different modulation (AM or FM), different ways to encode bits, and different packet structures.
These can definitely be tracked. I have an RPi with an RTL-SDR dongle that runs rtl_433 and logs the output. I pick up TPMS sensors from cars other than my own that are at least 18 meters away. This was using the small antenna that comes with many RTL-SDRs. I've now got a much better antenna that is picking up many more things on 433 MHz so probably am getting cars farther away now.
There was a study that explored this [1]. They put a network of 433 MHz sensors along roads and in parking lots. They captured 6 million packets from 20k cars. They found groups of IDs that came and went at the same time to fingerprint individual cars and were able to map out driver's daily routines and commute schedules.
Note that unlike cameras and automatic license plate readers this requires no line of sight, so is much less bothered by heavy rain or fog or dirty plates.
Use a good antenna and you should be able to make this work at up to maybe 100 meters or if the cars are in concrete parking structure.
[1] https://networks.imdea.org/your-cars-tire-sensors-could-be-u...
Aren’t they also removed when you get new tires, so you don’t have to replace them?
They are usually attached to the base of the valve stem, so if you are just putting on new tires they don't even need to be touched.
That would be too easy to remove. I'm thinking something like a tiny ribbon with a barcode embedded in the tread. Otherwise it would be trivial to cut the spigot (assuming that's where the sensor is located)
The sensor is stuck to the inside of the wheel and can't be removed without unmounting all 4 tires.
Yep! That's how your car picks it's own four tires out of a parking lot full of tires yelling their pressure.
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.
That's backwards, trucks are the cause of most road damage in the first place. Trucking companies should pay enormous fees to use the roads given the disproportionate amount of damage they do to them[1].
It should be cost prohibitive to use trucks for anything but local deliveries. Before you say "this will increase costs for consumers," recognize consumers are already paying for these roads.
Truckers pay for hundreds of thousands of dollars in fuel every year. They pay way more gas tax than you do.
If the retread comes off from hitting a pothole, that's an issue with the re-manufacturer.
I didn't use the word "fine" - as in "$500 fine for littering". I said "bill you". If a DoT has to stop and collect a strip of retread then he should bill a proper rate for his time and resources. If a stack of tires is abandoned in the desert, they should be collected, disposed of properly, and send the bill to the owner. A uuid embedded in the tread would facilitate that.
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So normal US background noise?
Not exactly. You can own fully automatic “machine guns” here, but you have to purchase an exorbitantly priced tax stamp. There are special triggers you can add to your AR-15 that allow full auto via legal loopholes. But they’re banned on a regular basis after the ATF catches wind. Your best chance at hearing a machine gun sound is at a car meet up where the young hoodlums have aggressive pop tunes (explosions bang and pop out of the exhaust) or at a shooting range that rents out actually fully automatic rifles.
What a silly law. If a tire is "inefficient" and therefore "bad", why can't California just ban the sale of them? Instead there will be a new government funded office and rating system with "leaf" icons that 95% of consumers will ignore completely.
Like all types of laws like this, the "$1B" claim will never be reviewed or judged to see how accurate it is. (It's not, at all)
It'll never get reviewed. They'll distract them with something other piece of news.
And don't be shocked if a bunch of California government officials bought a bunch of Goodyear stock right before this.
Because things aren't as simple as you make up.
"why can't California just ban the sale of them" -- because that infringes freedom too much? There are probably lots of special machines with tires (e.g. in construction, farming, mining) that absolutely need "bad tyres". Because only they work, e.g. due to construction form or physical properties like maximum pressure.
If some armchair person now goes here and outright bans all tyres that don't match some efficiency numbers ... then all of the users of such equipment will be punished. THAT would be an overreaching government action.
However, having some labels that indicate to those customers that care (and can care, because they don't have to consider other constraints) is actually something that enlarges freedom. You get the info, you can act on it, but you're still free to NOT act on it should the circumstances for that be okay. And ultimately it's you that decides this, not some government authority.
So about 1% of a 1% of a market. Got it. All of the information about the tires is already available. There is no new information, just duplicated.
If a large number of consumers actually cared about their tires drag coefficient we wouldn't be having this conversation, because a large number of consumers already cared about their tires drag coefficient. But nobody does and this law will not change anything.
The fact that information is available somewhere is very different from making it available easily to the consumer right when they need it.
What possible argument is there against that?
Do you really think most consumers didn’t care? Or do you think most consumers don’t even know? Cause I’m willing to bet it’s number two.
The argument is it's a waste of time, energy, and money that could be used elsewhere. If the creators of this law really thought this would change behavior, they would put a "review" into the law in 5 years with clear success metrics. But they don't, because this law, like many others, is all about signaling, and not results.
And no, most consumers do not care. Do you know how many people buy used tires because they can't afford new ones?
Sure, the information is more readily available. But what do you think the overlap is of people who care about very, very, very small improvements to tire efficiency and those who can't spend 10 seconds to look up the information themselves?
> If a tire is "inefficient" and therefore "bad", why can't California just ban the sale of them? Instead there will be a new government funded office and rating system
Isn’t it doing both?
I understand how the article could make it sound like they're doing some kind of complicated matching process, but what California is doing here is pretty close to just banning the sale of them. They're establishing the rolling resistance coefficient as the state's official measure of tire efficiency, attaching a leaf ranking to different ranges, and through 2031 phasing in maximum values which tires must meet to be sold.