The weighty debate about electric vehicles By Rob Miller | Opinion | March 14th 2024  A friend recently expressed concern about electric vehicles destroying our roads and bridges. She’d read this in a Globe and Mail article and thought it made sense because EVs are so heavy. This wasn’t the first time I’d heard EVs were going toruin our roads, so I was quick to point out that the top-selling vehicles in Canada are, in fact, much heavier than the top-selling EV, the Tesla Model Y. Depending on the options, the Model Y’s curb weightis between 1,900 and 2,000 kilograms. The three most popular vehicles in Canada are the Ford F-Series, Chevy Silverado and Dodge Ram pickups. The curb weight of these trucks is between 1,800 kilograms for the six-cylinder F-150 and 3,400 kilograms for the Silverado 3500 HD. The Nissan Leaf is one of the lightest EVs on the Canadian market, weighing in at just under 1,600 kilograms. One question always comes to mind when EVs are attacked because of their weightiness. Why are we only hearing this now? The Globe and Mail’s Eric Reguly is suddenly calling for a weight-based tax on all heavy vehicles, but his end game is to discourage EV buyers. The timing has more to do with a widespread media campaign aimed at resisting the inevitable transition to cleaner and more efficient transportation technology.  There’s no denying an EV is going to weigh more than an equivalent model of gas-powered car. For example, the Volvo XC40 weighs 2,280 kilograms while the electric version, XC40 Recharge, weighs 2,520 kilograms. Will that extra 240 kilos have a big impact on our roads? If so, perhaps we should have a weight tax on the occupants of vehicles as well. In the 1950s, the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO) performed testing to determine how much road damage was being caused by trucks. The report produced the generalized fourth power law to compare road damage caused by vehicles of different weights. Based on the formula derived from AASHO’s results, an electric XC40 is roughly 1.5 times more damaging to the road than a gas-powered XC40. The heaviest Silverado is five times harder on our roads than the XC40. Inside Science concludes heavy trucks are far more damaging to roads than any passenger vehicle. In general, a 40-tonne semi with eight axles is over 600 times more damaging to roads than an average two-tonne passenger vehicle. Imagine a day when everyone owns an EV except for a few antique collectors. Our roads will be free of those 30,000-kilogram tanker trucks that bring gasoline on a daily or weekly basis to the nearly 12,000 service stationsacross Canada. That will certainly take a load off our pavement, but action movie directors will have to find something else to jackknife and explode in the midst of a car chase. Perhaps Reguly is onto something. Lost revenue from dwindling gasoline taxes could be replaced with a weight tax on vehicles. The cost impact on EVs would be minimal if the tax is calculated according to each vehicle’s potential to cause road damage and it might create some motivation for people to purchase smaller vehicles. EV subsidies could also be used to incentivize lighter vehicles by scaling them to favour smaller, lighter and lower-cost EVs. The misguided concerns over EV weight don’t end with the road damage con job. Apparently, extra tire wear is going to fill our skies with nanoparticles. A reportby Euan McTurk commissioned by the Royal Automobile Club(RAC) in the U.K. points out errors in the research that spawned this misinformation campaign.....and there's more- read on           https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/03/14/opinion/weighty-debate-about-electric-vehicles