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.
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.
The US military-industrial complex is the single largest institutional hydrocarbon consumer and greenhouse gas emitter on the planet. It would be pretty stupid for me to listen to the government's advice about how best we should preserve the environment.
So the issue is under regulation, yeah, agree on that point.
Sounds like the only reasonable solution to the problem you raise is that the part of our government that's responsible for defense should be put under the seperate part that is responsible for protecting our environment instead of being exempt. I can't see any other real way of resolving that issue can you?
Because government self regulation totally works and the resources used up and the size of the government has not grown by such magnitudes that would make the founding fathers rethink the whole idea of democracy?
Ok, so no particular disagreement or pragmatic pitched alternative, great! I agree, structurally improved government and regulations is the only definable way forward for me too.
China has been the largest ghg emitter for the last 20 years, and currently emits more than twice as much as the us. Gdp spent on defense is similar as a fraction of gdp (slightly more in the us). So realistically the Chinese military is by far a larger emitter of ghg than the us military.
> 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.
Just as a geographic note: You can buy winter tires in California. The Sierra Nevada (snowy mountains) run down a sizable chunk of the state. California has even hosted the winter olympics.
You left the "and" but left out the critical part of my quote: They're not as good as summer-only tires in the summer.
> A lot of people don't live in climates where winter tires are even sold
The CrossClimate 2 tire we're talking about is an all-weather tire with the 3-peak snow designator. If you're trying to call me out for talking about winter tires in comparison to a tire designed for winter weather, I think you don't understand what we're talking about.
> Many people in those states aren't even aware "winter tires" are even a product category
Again, the CrossClimate 2 is a tire with a winter designation. California also has a lot of snowy locations.
> That's like complaining the Walmart in Anchorage, Alaska doesn't carry SPF 50 sunscreen.
Not only do stores in Anchorage carry SPF 50, but you're going to need it in the summer. When the sun is out for 20 hours a day, it adds up.
My Mach-E came with CrossClimate2 tires and I am not impressed. I've accidentally lit up all 4 tires under hard acceleration on a dry road, despite 5000 lbs pushing them into the ground and some amount of traction control still active.
I have a lighter sports car making similar power, on Michelin Pilot 4S summer tires. That car just grips and goes with barely a squeal. Good summer tires also have far better wet performance than CC2s, and they provide better feedback.. you feel more planted and in control.
I am impressed overall with the CC2's ability to be a true all-rounder that is usable in snow, but it is still an exercise in trade-offs and it'll never be as good as any purpose-built tire is at its purpose.
> ... 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.
That is incredible. My front ones are toast after only 15 000 miles / 25 000 km ( Continental Sport Contact 3 / N0 rating) and two years. 95 000 miles and I'd need to change them not because of wear but because they'd be legally too old.
Indeed, I put a full set of CrossClimate2 on my German car and the two back tires were completely toast within 24 months and ~15k Km (on Canada). After that I decided to start using proper summer and winter tires.
Have any of yall given up on “nice tires” due to constant nail / screw punctures and subsequent loss within a very low mileage count?
I believe I spent $1200 on my last set only to lose two of them in the first six months due to road debris. Perhaps this is down stream of living in a boom state with constant construction but I’m nearly replacing cracked windshields and at least partial tires annually as of late.
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.
I'm not sure about your imagination. If people had worse tires then it would be even more difficult to go straight from the far left lane to the offramp 20 above the flow of traffic. /s
This is what I always thought. But I have Pirelli Cinturato SF3 tires now. All season. Excellent stiffness and feel. Great handling in the wet. Virtually silent up to 80-90km/h and as efficient as the Michelin summer tires and more efficient than the continental winter tires I had.
So apparently, design and compound can cater for a lot.
Unfortunately, snow performance on my front drive car is worse than my XC90 has in AWD mode with summer tires. (
Of course it is trade-offs. But not all trade offs are linear on the same axis and conditions. For example, changing the compound to make it a bit harder may increase the longevity of the tire significantly in moderate climates at only a limited decrease in grip. And maybe even improved cornering.
Tire manufacturers tend to have different compounds for Europe (focused on lower rolling resistance) and North America (focused on traction and a wider range of working temperatures). I'd guess that California will now simply get the EU variants instead of the NA variants.
I would assume US tires also focus more on milage too. Europeans don't drive as far and you don't really want a bunch of old aged tires still driving around even if they got the tread.
Precisely because NA drivers drive a lot more, NA compounds are more focused on durability rather than increasing car mileage. EU drivers are alright with less durable compounds because rubber gets cooked after a few years and would have to be replaced anyway.
EU tires focus on low rolling resistance and low breaking distance (due to environmental and safety regulations), NA tires focus on durability (became people drive a lot more) and suitability for a wide range of temperatures (became of the climate).
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.
> probably increasing their carbon footprint at the manufacturing level
This is auto consumers carbon footprint; not just you but you too.
There is little value to physical reality segmenting rhetorically between "rich and poor" or "consumers and businesses". The carbon footprint is due to human activity full stop.
Trying to live in rhetorical bubbles is trying to maintain social moats; stick to the script and you're off the hook!
Politically correct weasel wordy terms you like to deploy are just evidence the propaganda worked on you; letting yourself off the hook for your existence as if Jesus paid for your sins
A number of wannabe intelligent people who stick to the script and ignore the externalities of their own existence are disingenuous and self aggrandizing tools.
So sick of social media tools wasting resources spreading their self absorbed rage bait about idiots in government; random idiots themselves with pseudonyms and no reason to believe they give a crap really (look at reality itself lately; why believe the shit people say?)
Log off and let the open web joke die. Tech scene adjacent people are just turning into little more than religiously dogmatic old Boomers; can't move on.
> This is auto consumers carbon footprint; not just you but you too.
I know that, no need to be patronizing, if you read what I said, I clearly want a lower carbon footprint all around. Sorry if you read weasel words into my statement. Wasn't the intention.
> three major trade-off when it comes to tire compounds
We are inventing better and better compounds though, which just plain better at all three.
Formula 1 has to artificially nerf their tire compounds just to force racing teams to actually change tires at all - compounds are good enough that they can get all the grip they need while also lasting the entire race. But that's not as fun for the sport so they specific to the tire vendor that the tires must wear out halfway through the race -- but that reduced life doesn't yield increased grip.
The Michelin Defender tires are pretty all-around great in all conditions while still lasting 80,000 miles. For most people who buy a new car, that would be the only set of tires they ever buy (stock tires for 20k miles or so and then this one set until 100k and sell the used vehicle before they need to buy a second set)
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!
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.
Most scales don't even log/alert/flag weights below the maximum legal axle weight or axle group weight. So a 2-axle truck can weigh 40k and nobody will hear about it. In the event that they're fancy and integrated with an ALPR (assuming your plate is readable, lots of ways to game that on a box truck) the scales don't typically extend onto the paved shoulder. Even if they do you slow down and drop a tire off the pavement. And if all that fails, if you have air suspension you can dump the axle as the truck is going over the scale.
Ah thanks! So a design/operation flaw of the scales! I didn't realize they were run/monitored so incompetently, where concepts like "make sure the truck is actually on the scale" were ignored. But, I'm in no way surprised! That's governing bodies for ya!
Overloading is for trucks what speeding is for cars. They don't really "care" beyond revenue as long as you're not absurd about it. The rules were never written to be fully enforced.
Once you understand this the whole system makes sense.
I would argue that someone driving around with 60 psi in tires that are supposed to be 33 is a smidgeon more than minutiae, since there is a real risk.
As a Scandinavian that sounds normal, and has been my entire life. In fact you don't need to buy gas to use the free air or water, it is just out in the open in a service cabinet or on the side of the building. (There is sometimes a sign that the water is only for cleaning your windows / mixing windshield fluid from concentrate, not for filling up RVs, and the flow is very slow.)
I'm curious, do they actually check that you buy gas in the US before letting you get those services?
Free air is very common these days. I don't think a purchase has ever been required for free air anywhere I've been. Occasionally you need to go in and get a free token since the air machine is still coin operated, but I've never been asked to prove a purchase.
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 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.
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."
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?
You can, you just pay more for them. Take a look at the bicycle rolling resistance website. There are absolutely tires with great rolling resistance, excellent grip and pretty good wear characteristics. You just pay ~$100 a tire for them instead of the $30-$50 for OEM crap ones.
You can get very good tire performance with long life these days. They don't even cost that much. It's just most people buying tires don't learn about tires, they simply buy whatever the store sells them. There's a lot of bad tires out there with bad performance and weak lifespan.
Michelin Defenders are warrantied for minimum 80,000 miles and are relatively low noise, good economy, good performance all around but especially good in rain. They cost $185/tire for a Honda Civic, which is a pretty normal price) (range for Honda Civic tires at Costco are $160-235, at TireRack $185/ea puts these about $25/tire over the median tire price for Honda Civic's)
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.
Tires that wear out quickly don't sound good for the economy or the environment. So that probably should be constrained too. So the companies can finally focus on delivering maximum grip for bounded wear and efficiency instead of juggling all three to the music played by marketing.
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.
I live in Northern Germany so a temperate climate all in all, although nowadays it gets really hot during the summer.
Well everyone says they are a good driver, and probably they are not. But I like to drive in a way that I rarely if ever have to engage the breaks. I also try to spread the regen distance if that makes sense, so it doesn't do a hard stop but slows down... gently over a longer distance. And when it comes to curves I try to follow the late apex line approach.
I was also lucky with my car though, it came with an excellent wheel alignment which isn't always the case.
Regen braking is pretty amazing, I love it. I wish it was more configurable, though.
I test drove the weird Mazda MX-30 and while it was too gutless and low-range to buy, one thing that impressed the hell out of me was the use of flappy-paddles behind the steering wheel to control regen strength. Felt like downshifting an automatic; you could set it to give you max regen without engaging the mechanical brakes, or total freewheeling. Made for some interesting hypermiling potential. Hopefully they ship a more complete EV one day!
Somewhat true, but you don't get brake fade from it, and since the slowdown is more gradual you shouldn't be asking anywhere near as much from the tires as you would be under real braking.
Ah yes, California the land of regulations. A compliance tax for the tire companies, less freedom of choice from consumers, and likely inferior products for a hefty subset of use cases. Tale as old as time.
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.”
My nose for unintended consequences says manufacturers could start selling cars with worse tires to bring down the average.
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.
When buying tires as an average Joe for an average car (like a Corolla or Camry) it seems like being an OEM tire is actually a badge of honor for a tire. The reason is that that's the tire that they report MPG with and that you have on the car when you test drive it, so manufacturers care about ride quality and efficiency in the OEM tire. There's a lot of tires that are cheaper than OEM tires and they perform worse.
> 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.
>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.
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...
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.)
Manufacturers should be forced to publish basically everything about the products they introduce into the market. Freedom of information laws should apply to large manufacturers.
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.
It's not that they go to home depot, it's that they buy whatever is cheapest because "LED bulb = LED bulb", and then talk about how LED bulbs are trash.
I don’t know that they are illegal, but they are legitimately useless. You can get high-quality LED bulbs and very warm LED bulbs. All my LEDs are about as warm, maybe even warmer, than incandescents. Like orange in color.
LEDs are universally better. They use way less energy and last way, way longer. The end result is you save a shit ton of money.
I don't like warm lighting and especially orange lighting. But it's nearly impossible to find cool lighting that doesn't flicker like mad. Even adjustable color temperature fixtures usually don't reach anywhere near their rated brightness at the coolest color temperature...
Not actually as pricey as my current bulbs, but undimmable and about 70% less lumen output (visually about 30% less bright). It does have a MUCH better CRI though.
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.
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.
"the assumption that higher efficiency tires are worse gripping" This is fact not assumption. Ironically you are the one who made an assumption here. People who don't understand a topic should not attempt to regulate it based on assumptions.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Given a fixed per-gallon gas tax, if you assume a 3000lb, 2 axle vehicle that gets 30mpg is paying enough road tax to cover its usage, then an 80,000lb, 5 axle vehicle would need to consume 320 gallons per mile to be paying gas tax proportionate to its road usage.
They don't (thankfully), so it's not. Trucks are massively subsidized by everyone else.
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.
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.
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)
"...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?
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.
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.
> 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.
When WA launched the CCA , claiming it would cost only pennies, it ended up costing a lot more per tank. The claimed emissions reduction was very large, and the actual reduction was negligible.
This program claims 2 MMT reduction per year, but that assumes 100% adoption , after they move past the voluntary restrictions , into mandatory restrictions, and will eventually require on-road tread enforcement.
Are you okay with being pulled over for the wrong tread? it's annoying enough to face snow chains enforcement.
The only way to reach 100% adoption is with highway tread enforcement. Like we do for highway emissions enforcement.
What do you think they will use the Flock cameras for?
Slightly tangential, but I wonder how much energy savings could be had if street light timings factored in the energy it takes to get cars moving from a stop to the posted speed limit from one intersection to the next. Terrible light timings around my area mean 20-30 cars all start getting to move only to stop a short distance later because one car on a side street happened to approach the sensor when a larger intersection turned green, which leads to a snowball affect where the timings at the next major intersection don’t consider the odd side street breaking the flow, causing more and more timing issues.
This affects not just gas/electricity usage but also tire and brake wear.
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.
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.
Gas tax has always been a proxy metric for mileage in order to implement usage based costs to help offset the many billions of dollars California spends maintaining roads every year.
Gas as a proxy for mileage breaks down with widespread EV usage, so even though they are a benefit for many reasons with incentivizing, they still require expensive road upkeep so should not be immune from usage taxation.
Or, spitballing here, let the gas tax reprieve be the incentive and don't offer a rebate for EVs. Regardless, gas tax is a stupid way to pay for roads. Everyone uses roads, whether they drive on them or not.
And, they won't be repealing the gas tax. They'll be adding a mileage tax on top of the gas tax.
> And, they won't be repealing the gas tax. They'll be adding a mileage tax on top of the gas tax.
If that incentivizes more people to buy EVs and drop their gas vehicles, that's great. And I say this as a driver of a gas-powered car with not-the-best MPG.
Of course, the problem with this is that new EVs are expensive, and the kinds of people who drive older, inefficient ICE cars are the kinds of people who probably can't afford a new EV. (Not sure what the used market is looking like, though.)
That seems reasonable, no? The goal is for road users to pay for their use of public roads. Gas tax used to be a decent proxy for road usage, but with EVs it's not anymore, so we need something else. Reading people's odometers is a better reflection of their road use.
Of course you can't tell if they were driving on public roads, or just driving around in a circle in their backyard for hours... but that uncertainty exists for the gas tax too.
> 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.
EVs in CA have a special $121 tax to make up for "don't pay gas tax."
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'd imagine a serious effort to invest in mass transportation would include an investment in safety. Are you suggesting Japan and Singapore are just inherently safer, without having actively done anything to make it that way?
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.
It seems like the idea is that we get more fuel efficient tires but at the price of having tires that wear out more quickly? That seems like a pretty lousy proposition, especially when you factor in externalities like all the micro-particle pollution that tires produce and the chronic health effects they can cause.
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"
> 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.
Let’s do other way. If it is true that energy efficient tiers will save money then there will no need to have a law. We could do just some marketing campaign and people will be: aha I love money so let’s save money.
But it is not about saving but it is about environment. And this where I get a little weary about: if they are willing to stretch truths here where else are they doing that. Requiring ID to browse internet? Flock cameras?
Of course they will use left vs right argument but I doubt this is all about saving environment.
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.
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.
I don’t understand why anyone wants tires rated for much more than 40k miles. Inevitably you will have to replace damaged tires from road hazard much earlier than their rated life
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.
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.
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.
There seem to be some knowledgeable commenters here.
How does a noob (asking for a friend) figure out what tires to buy? What should my friend be looking for?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your first statement is pure opinion (and a prejudiced one at that), so I will skip that.
Your second statement is a question worth investigating: why should the government be involved here? The simple answer is that the market has not moved for the problem of tire efficiency. There is a quote in the article that goes to the heart of this: “It’s very difficult or impossible for consumers to know how energy efficient their tires are going to be, as a result, many people unknowingly buy tires that cost them more money than necessary”. Large imbalances (like this) in information are one of the things markets do not work well in.
So the solution here is to (gradually) put a floor under how inefficient tires can be. This is one way to solve the market inefficiency (since it treated this as an externality).
I would rather have had them use an approach more like the EnergyStar system, where it requires a simple rating for the efficiency, including average savings and where this sits in comparison with competitors (in that range). I would even add to that a green/yellow/red system that would be allowed to slide the ranges over time to reflect what the market can currently produce.
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.
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
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)
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.
"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 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
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.
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.
You just need social stigma on bad tires. It's the single most important thing on your vehicle, for literally all the reasons out there.
Right after we have a social stigma for people that keep voting to have the government involved in every bit of their lives.
How about when the market fails customers, still no government involvement? Food and drugs regulation, environment stuff (you are here) and so on?
The US military-industrial complex is the single largest institutional hydrocarbon consumer and greenhouse gas emitter on the planet. It would be pretty stupid for me to listen to the government's advice about how best we should preserve the environment.
So the issue is under regulation, yeah, agree on that point.
Sounds like the only reasonable solution to the problem you raise is that the part of our government that's responsible for defense should be put under the seperate part that is responsible for protecting our environment instead of being exempt. I can't see any other real way of resolving that issue can you?
Because government self regulation totally works and the resources used up and the size of the government has not grown by such magnitudes that would make the founding fathers rethink the whole idea of democracy?
Ok, so no particular disagreement or pragmatic pitched alternative, great! I agree, structurally improved government and regulations is the only definable way forward for me too.
China has been the largest ghg emitter for the last 20 years, and currently emits more than twice as much as the us. Gdp spent on defense is similar as a fraction of gdp (slightly more in the us). So realistically the Chinese military is by far a larger emitter of ghg than the us military.
We can’t successfully shame each other to avoid Hot Pockets and big brands of cereal that acutely poison our kids.
You think people are going to tread-peek?!
I agree with you, but we’re both going to be disappointed.
I've tried social stigma on lack-of-using-turn-signals, and have been about as disappointed as you are likely to be hah.
> 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.
Just as a geographic note: You can buy winter tires in California. The Sierra Nevada (snowy mountains) run down a sizable chunk of the state. California has even hosted the winter olympics.
You left the "and" but left out the critical part of my quote: They're not as good as summer-only tires in the summer.
> A lot of people don't live in climates where winter tires are even sold
The CrossClimate 2 tire we're talking about is an all-weather tire with the 3-peak snow designator. If you're trying to call me out for talking about winter tires in comparison to a tire designed for winter weather, I think you don't understand what we're talking about.
> Many people in those states aren't even aware "winter tires" are even a product category
Again, the CrossClimate 2 is a tire with a winter designation. California also has a lot of snowy locations.
> That's like complaining the Walmart in Anchorage, Alaska doesn't carry SPF 50 sunscreen.
Not only do stores in Anchorage carry SPF 50, but you're going to need it in the summer. When the sun is out for 20 hours a day, it adds up.
Not to mention, skiers wear sun screen. The sunlight refracting off the snow can cause sunburns.
You're gonna want SPF 50 in Alaska too.
And also a dedicated set of tires for the winter, that have studs in them.
And Walmart has it in stock in Anchorage. So a moot point.
I’ve not noticed a mushy feeling on my wife’s Mazda CX-9 with CC2s, but tbf it’s an SUV. One of the sportier SUVs around, but still.
For reference, I used to daily a Honda S2000 (not with CC2s, obviously).
> I’ve not noticed a mushy feeling on my wife’s Mazda CX-9 with CC2s, but tbf it’s an SUV. One of the sportier SUVs around, but still.
They are not great in that regard. Casual drivers won't usually care, but anyone who pays attention to handling usually hates them.
My Mach-E came with CrossClimate2 tires and I am not impressed. I've accidentally lit up all 4 tires under hard acceleration on a dry road, despite 5000 lbs pushing them into the ground and some amount of traction control still active.
I have a lighter sports car making similar power, on Michelin Pilot 4S summer tires. That car just grips and goes with barely a squeal. Good summer tires also have far better wet performance than CC2s, and they provide better feedback.. you feel more planted and in control.
I am impressed overall with the CC2's ability to be a true all-rounder that is usable in snow, but it is still an exercise in trade-offs and it'll never be as good as any purpose-built tire is at its purpose.
>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.
> ... 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.
That is incredible. My front ones are toast after only 15 000 miles / 25 000 km ( Continental Sport Contact 3 / N0 rating) and two years. 95 000 miles and I'd need to change them not because of wear but because they'd be legally too old.
At some point I'll buy a reasonable car.
If you put Cross Climate 2s on whatever German car your Sport Contact 3s came on you'd instantly regret it just because of how it drives.
Indeed, I put a full set of CrossClimate2 on my German car and the two back tires were completely toast within 24 months and ~15k Km (on Canada). After that I decided to start using proper summer and winter tires.
Have any of yall given up on “nice tires” due to constant nail / screw punctures and subsequent loss within a very low mileage count?
I believe I spent $1200 on my last set only to lose two of them in the first six months due to road debris. Perhaps this is down stream of living in a boom state with constant construction but I’m nearly replacing cracked windshields and at least partial tires annually as of late.
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.
It's hard to imagine median driver performance is SoCal being any worse in heavy rain than it already is.
I'm not sure the tires matter all that much if you don't alter your driving at all.
I'm not sure about your imagination. If people had worse tires then it would be even more difficult to go straight from the far left lane to the offramp 20 above the flow of traffic. /s
Off-ramp? They have trouble going in a straight line.
This is what I always thought. But I have Pirelli Cinturato SF3 tires now. All season. Excellent stiffness and feel. Great handling in the wet. Virtually silent up to 80-90km/h and as efficient as the Michelin summer tires and more efficient than the continental winter tires I had.
So apparently, design and compound can cater for a lot.
Unfortunately, snow performance on my front drive car is worse than my XC90 has in AWD mode with summer tires. (
Design and compound matters a lot, but it's still a tradeoff.
The easiest way to increase rolling resistance is to reduce the tread depth. Less deformation of the rubber leads to less rolling resistance.
So to improve rolling resistance, the designers can reduce tread depth and move to a harder compound, which trades off grip.
Modern tires are good, but everything is tradeoffs.
Of course it is trade-offs. But not all trade offs are linear on the same axis and conditions. For example, changing the compound to make it a bit harder may increase the longevity of the tire significantly in moderate climates at only a limited decrease in grip. And maybe even improved cornering.
Tire manufacturers tend to have different compounds for Europe (focused on lower rolling resistance) and North America (focused on traction and a wider range of working temperatures). I'd guess that California will now simply get the EU variants instead of the NA variants.
I would assume US tires also focus more on milage too. Europeans don't drive as far and you don't really want a bunch of old aged tires still driving around even if they got the tread.
Precisely because NA drivers drive a lot more, NA compounds are more focused on durability rather than increasing car mileage. EU drivers are alright with less durable compounds because rubber gets cooked after a few years and would have to be replaced anyway.
From what I remember European tired were often outperforming American tires in stopping performance and other metrics. So not sure that's true.
EU tires focus on low rolling resistance and low breaking distance (due to environmental and safety regulations), NA tires focus on durability (became people drive a lot more) and suitability for a wide range of temperatures (became of the climate).
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.
This is about California. A place where an overwhelming majority of tires are all season, which are exempt from this.
> probably increasing their carbon footprint at the manufacturing level
This is auto consumers carbon footprint; not just you but you too.
There is little value to physical reality segmenting rhetorically between "rich and poor" or "consumers and businesses". The carbon footprint is due to human activity full stop.
Trying to live in rhetorical bubbles is trying to maintain social moats; stick to the script and you're off the hook!
Politically correct weasel wordy terms you like to deploy are just evidence the propaganda worked on you; letting yourself off the hook for your existence as if Jesus paid for your sins
A number of wannabe intelligent people who stick to the script and ignore the externalities of their own existence are disingenuous and self aggrandizing tools.
So sick of social media tools wasting resources spreading their self absorbed rage bait about idiots in government; random idiots themselves with pseudonyms and no reason to believe they give a crap really (look at reality itself lately; why believe the shit people say?)
Log off and let the open web joke die. Tech scene adjacent people are just turning into little more than religiously dogmatic old Boomers; can't move on.
> This is auto consumers carbon footprint; not just you but you too.
I know that, no need to be patronizing, if you read what I said, I clearly want a lower carbon footprint all around. Sorry if you read weasel words into my statement. Wasn't the intention.
> three major trade-off when it comes to tire compounds
We are inventing better and better compounds though, which just plain better at all three.
Formula 1 has to artificially nerf their tire compounds just to force racing teams to actually change tires at all - compounds are good enough that they can get all the grip they need while also lasting the entire race. But that's not as fun for the sport so they specific to the tire vendor that the tires must wear out halfway through the race -- but that reduced life doesn't yield increased grip.
The Michelin Defender tires are pretty all-around great in all conditions while still lasting 80,000 miles. For most people who buy a new car, that would be the only set of tires they ever buy (stock tires for 20k miles or so and then this one set until 100k and sell the used vehicle before they need to buy a second set)
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.
You shift your route. Not the load
> The road scales are easily gamed, or just avoided.
Yes, they stated that in the second half, and I addressed it. What's the first half?
Most scales don't even log/alert/flag weights below the maximum legal axle weight or axle group weight. So a 2-axle truck can weigh 40k and nobody will hear about it. In the event that they're fancy and integrated with an ALPR (assuming your plate is readable, lots of ways to game that on a box truck) the scales don't typically extend onto the paved shoulder. Even if they do you slow down and drop a tire off the pavement. And if all that fails, if you have air suspension you can dump the axle as the truck is going over the scale.
Ah thanks! So a design/operation flaw of the scales! I didn't realize they were run/monitored so incompetently, where concepts like "make sure the truck is actually on the scale" were ignored. But, I'm in no way surprised! That's governing bodies for ya!
Overloading is for trucks what speeding is for cars. They don't really "care" beyond revenue as long as you're not absurd about it. The rules were never written to be fully enforced.
Once you understand this the whole system makes sense.
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.
Because that could not also be a citable offense?
We could also make cooking up hair brained schemes to regulate minutia a citable offense.
I would argue that someone driving around with 60 psi in tires that are supposed to be 33 is a smidgeon more than minutiae, since there is a real risk.
Doesn't TPMS take care of that? Though, it seems like it's being done in software now to save costs...
We are part way there, gas stations are required to provide free air and a gauge to customers buying gas.
As a Scandinavian that sounds normal, and has been my entire life. In fact you don't need to buy gas to use the free air or water, it is just out in the open in a service cabinet or on the side of the building. (There is sometimes a sign that the water is only for cleaning your windows / mixing windshield fluid from concentrate, not for filling up RVs, and the flow is very slow.)
I'm curious, do they actually check that you buy gas in the US before letting you get those services?
Free air is very common these days. I don't think a purchase has ever been required for free air anywhere I've been. Occasionally you need to go in and get a free token since the air machine is still coin operated, but I've never been asked to prove a purchase.
The one near my house has a card reader :(
We have some free air stations in the US around me, but they are rare, and people absolutely beat the shit of them. Half the time they're broken :(
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 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.
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."
Apparently many new cars come with tires with less than normal tread, one of the reasons is to have greater fuel economy.
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?
You can, you just pay more for them. Take a look at the bicycle rolling resistance website. There are absolutely tires with great rolling resistance, excellent grip and pretty good wear characteristics. You just pay ~$100 a tire for them instead of the $30-$50 for OEM crap ones.
You can get very good tire performance with long life these days. They don't even cost that much. It's just most people buying tires don't learn about tires, they simply buy whatever the store sells them. There's a lot of bad tires out there with bad performance and weak lifespan.
Michelin Defenders are warrantied for minimum 80,000 miles and are relatively low noise, good economy, good performance all around but especially good in rain. They cost $185/tire for a Honda Civic, which is a pretty normal price) (range for Honda Civic tires at Costco are $160-235, at TireRack $185/ea puts these about $25/tire over the median tire price for Honda Civic's)
>$185/tire for a Honda Civic, which is a pretty normal price
That's like double the price of random import stuff.
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.
Tires that wear out quickly don't sound good for the economy or the environment. So that probably should be constrained too. So the companies can finally focus on delivering maximum grip for bounded wear and efficiency instead of juggling all three to the music played by marketing.
I wonder if better rolling resistance + decent safe traction means more tire particulate pollution.
You should have grippy tires when traversing those mountains.
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.
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.
Well, how do you drive? And in what climate?
I live in Northern Germany so a temperate climate all in all, although nowadays it gets really hot during the summer.
Well everyone says they are a good driver, and probably they are not. But I like to drive in a way that I rarely if ever have to engage the breaks. I also try to spread the regen distance if that makes sense, so it doesn't do a hard stop but slows down... gently over a longer distance. And when it comes to curves I try to follow the late apex line approach.
I was also lucky with my car though, it came with an excellent wheel alignment which isn't always the case.
Regen braking is pretty amazing, I love it. I wish it was more configurable, though.
I test drove the weird Mazda MX-30 and while it was too gutless and low-range to buy, one thing that impressed the hell out of me was the use of flappy-paddles behind the steering wheel to control regen strength. Felt like downshifting an automatic; you could set it to give you max regen without engaging the mechanical brakes, or total freewheeling. Made for some interesting hypermiling potential. Hopefully they ship a more complete EV one day!
Every time you enter regen, you're engaging the brakes as far as the tires are concerned.
Somewhat true, but you don't get brake fade from it, and since the slowdown is more gradual you shouldn't be asking anywhere near as much from the tires as you would be under real braking.
Ah yes, California the land of regulations. A compliance tax for the tire companies, less freedom of choice from consumers, and likely inferior products for a hefty subset of use cases. Tale as old as time.
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.
California is also over regulated.
That being said, the quoted figures do sound good. Maybe less compelling in someplace like Texas with very low gas prices:
> 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.
When buying tires as an average Joe for an average car (like a Corolla or Camry) it seems like being an OEM tire is actually a badge of honor for a tire. The reason is that that's the tire that they report MPG with and that you have on the car when you test drive it, so manufacturers care about ride quality and efficiency in the OEM tire. There's a lot of tires that are cheaper than OEM tires and they perform worse.
> 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.
>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.
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...
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.)
Manufacturers should be forced to publish basically everything about the products they introduce into the market. Freedom of information laws should apply to large manufacturers.
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.
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?
That's unfortunate. I've found it to be a valuable resource in the past. Hopefully they are able to recover their site.
Same for me.
same here
This is an awesome resource, thank you for sharing. I especially love that Amazon basic bulbs are fine for the first on the list.
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.
You can buy really good LED lights. Pretty much everything sold at Home Depot is junk, not just light bulbs.
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).
It's not that they go to home depot, it's that they buy whatever is cheapest because "LED bulb = LED bulb", and then talk about how LED bulbs are trash.
Sounds like the problem is HD/Lowes driving all other alternatives out of business.
Although I only found the highly-rated Philips Ultra Definition bulbs at Walmart, of all places.
[dead]
Can you get (non-LED) lightbulbs you like online?
No. They are illegal.
I don’t know that they are illegal, but they are legitimately useless. You can get high-quality LED bulbs and very warm LED bulbs. All my LEDs are about as warm, maybe even warmer, than incandescents. Like orange in color.
LEDs are universally better. They use way less energy and last way, way longer. The end result is you save a shit ton of money.
I don't like warm lighting and especially orange lighting. But it's nearly impossible to find cool lighting that doesn't flicker like mad. Even adjustable color temperature fixtures usually don't reach anywhere near their rated brightness at the coolest color temperature...
https://store.waveformlighting.com/products/centric-daylight...
Pricey but they are flicker free
Not actually as pricey as my current bulbs, but undimmable and about 70% less lumen output (visually about 30% less bright). It does have a MUCH better CRI though.
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.
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.
"the assumption that higher efficiency tires are worse gripping" This is fact not assumption. Ironically you are the one who made an assumption here. People who don't understand a topic should not attempt to regulate it based on assumptions.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Every change to a complex situation will have negative outcomes.
A study was done, and they have clear data to make this decision.
As time moves forward, new studies can be done addressing your concerns, and decisions can be made about addressing those.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.
lol, clearly you have no experience with California and these types of decisions.
lol, better just give up and accept no improvement then.
The point is, it is no actual improvement.
But then, you likely are fully aware of that eh?
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.
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.
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.
This company is working on a pollution capture device:
https://thetyrecollective.com
Very cool.
> 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.
Railway dust contains quite a bit of PM2.5, PM10 and NOx.
Yup, make a rail to everybodys home instead, that will solve it.
It's worked before
The real changes are to make them less toxic! There are a bunch of approaches to take there.
This is measurable and actionable. Some tires pollute more, some less
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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.
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.
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.
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.
1. https://roadtax.carlitelb.org/
Truckers pay for hundreds of thousands of dollars in fuel every year. They pay way more gas tax than you do.
Yes they do, but is it enough?
Given a fixed per-gallon gas tax, if you assume a 3000lb, 2 axle vehicle that gets 30mpg is paying enough road tax to cover its usage, then an 80,000lb, 5 axle vehicle would need to consume 320 gallons per mile to be paying gas tax proportionate to its road usage.
They don't (thankfully), so it's not. Trucks are massively subsidized by everyone else.
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.
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.
"...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.
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.
It is already difficult to get most aftermarket parts in california- especially things in the combustion path. Can't even buy them off ebay.
Yes, but for tires, they explicitly make exceptions for summer tires etc here.
When WA launched the CCA , claiming it would cost only pennies, it ended up costing a lot more per tank. The claimed emissions reduction was very large, and the actual reduction was negligible.
This program claims 2 MMT reduction per year, but that assumes 100% adoption , after they move past the voluntary restrictions , into mandatory restrictions, and will eventually require on-road tread enforcement.
Are you okay with being pulled over for the wrong tread? it's annoying enough to face snow chains enforcement.
The only way to reach 100% adoption is with highway tread enforcement. Like we do for highway emissions enforcement.
What do you think they will use the Flock cameras for?
Slightly tangential, but I wonder how much energy savings could be had if street light timings factored in the energy it takes to get cars moving from a stop to the posted speed limit from one intersection to the next. Terrible light timings around my area mean 20-30 cars all start getting to move only to stop a short distance later because one car on a side street happened to approach the sensor when a larger intersection turned green, which leads to a snowball affect where the timings at the next major intersection don’t consider the odd side street breaking the flow, causing more and more timing issues. This affects not just gas/electricity usage but also tire and brake wear.
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.
Gas tax has always been a proxy metric for mileage in order to implement usage based costs to help offset the many billions of dollars California spends maintaining roads every year.
Gas as a proxy for mileage breaks down with widespread EV usage, so even though they are a benefit for many reasons with incentivizing, they still require expensive road upkeep so should not be immune from usage taxation.
Or, spitballing here, let the gas tax reprieve be the incentive and don't offer a rebate for EVs. Regardless, gas tax is a stupid way to pay for roads. Everyone uses roads, whether they drive on them or not.
And, they won't be repealing the gas tax. They'll be adding a mileage tax on top of the gas tax.
> And, they won't be repealing the gas tax. They'll be adding a mileage tax on top of the gas tax.
If that incentivizes more people to buy EVs and drop their gas vehicles, that's great. And I say this as a driver of a gas-powered car with not-the-best MPG.
Of course, the problem with this is that new EVs are expensive, and the kinds of people who drive older, inefficient ICE cars are the kinds of people who probably can't afford a new EV. (Not sure what the used market is looking like, though.)
Gas tax is how we originally built the whole highway system actually (that and bonds).
That seems reasonable, no? The goal is for road users to pay for their use of public roads. Gas tax used to be a decent proxy for road usage, but with EVs it's not anymore, so we need something else. Reading people's odometers is a better reflection of their road use.
Of course you can't tell if they were driving on public roads, or just driving around in a circle in their backyard for hours... but that uncertainty exists for the gas tax too.
> 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.
EVs in CA have a special $121 tax to make up for "don't pay gas tax."
The mileage-based road tax is for other reasons.
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?
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> 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'd imagine a serious effort to invest in mass transportation would include an investment in safety. Are you suggesting Japan and Singapore are just inherently safer, without having actively done anything to make it that way?
"my family is prohibited" christ almighty
The dirt (ground) of japan and singapore is not magic and does not confer safety, if that is what you are asking. It is a factor of something else
> "my family is prohibited" christ almighty
Yes, I take their safety seriously.
The rest of the story...
>California’s New Tire Rule Could Wipe Out 70% of What’s on the Shelf — And Sacramento Sat on the Law for 23 Years
https://theautowire.com/2026/08/18/californias-new-tire-rule...
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.
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 seems like the idea is that we get more fuel efficient tires but at the price of having tires that wear out more quickly? That seems like a pretty lousy proposition, especially when you factor in externalities like all the micro-particle pollution that tires produce and the chronic health effects they can cause.
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.
Let’s do other way. If it is true that energy efficient tiers will save money then there will no need to have a law. We could do just some marketing campaign and people will be: aha I love money so let’s save money.
But it is not about saving but it is about environment. And this where I get a little weary about: if they are willing to stretch truths here where else are they doing that. Requiring ID to browse internet? Flock cameras?
Of course they will use left vs right argument but I doubt this is all about saving environment.
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.
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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.
Driving slower in the rain?
People already don't do this, you think worse tires are gonna help?
Possibly an unrealistic expectation from the average driver.
Iterated games.
I don’t understand why anyone wants tires rated for much more than 40k miles. Inevitably you will have to replace damaged tires from road hazard much earlier than their rated life
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.
0. https://efiling.energy.ca.gov/GetDocument.aspx?tn=269612
1. https://www.scribd.com/document/915700524/ISO-28580-2018
> 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...
You're citations, if accurate, show only that some regulations don't work well. We already know that. But it's not a reason to do nothing.
> Bad regulation typically tries to nudge either consumers or producers in a direction contrary to the prevailing culture and/or economics
We wouldn't need regulation if the prevailing culture / economics was to already do that thing.
There seem to be some knowledgeable commenters here. How does a noob (asking for a friend) figure out what tires to buy? What should my friend be looking for?
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.
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.
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.
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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.
The energy efficient tires for my Chevy EV are $800 for a set of 4. You're paying the luxury car parts tax.
most of a passenger car's performance and handling is its tires
Isnt that because it has crazy torque, AWD, and high weight?
Same thing with ebike tires vs normal bike tires
Mine are really close to needing to be replaced and I’m not looking forward to the 1500+ it’ll cost. I’ve gone further than the est lifespan at least.
you can cheaper ones. i'm shopping for them on discount tires.com and there;'s some for like 100$ per tire.
Look for low rolling resistance. chat gpt helps with this a lot
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.
Also I would get tires changed in Nevada in this case.
So, your Honda is worth $400?
Don't be obtuse. He was saying 4x the cost of the tires.
> those tires are literally 4X the price of my other car a Honda
I once sold a fully working car for $250, so why not
Ok, does anyone have a list of these new tires that I can source from Costco?
what an unbelievably hostile cookie banner
Ridiculous regulations have been California's MO since at least the middle of the last century.
Why in the hell should the government be regulating this?
Your first statement is pure opinion (and a prejudiced one at that), so I will skip that.
Your second statement is a question worth investigating: why should the government be involved here? The simple answer is that the market has not moved for the problem of tire efficiency. There is a quote in the article that goes to the heart of this: “It’s very difficult or impossible for consumers to know how energy efficient their tires are going to be, as a result, many people unknowingly buy tires that cost them more money than necessary”. Large imbalances (like this) in information are one of the things markets do not work well in.
So the solution here is to (gradually) put a floor under how inefficient tires can be. This is one way to solve the market inefficiency (since it treated this as an externality).
I would rather have had them use an approach more like the EnergyStar system, where it requires a simple rating for the efficiency, including average savings and where this sits in comparison with competitors (in that range). I would even add to that a green/yellow/red system that would be allowed to slide the ranges over time to reflect what the market can currently produce.
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
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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)
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.
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?