logoalt Hacker News

asa400today at 9:17 PM4 repliesview on HN

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.


Replies

KaiserProtoday at 10:11 PM

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.

show 1 reply
larkosttoday at 9:46 PM

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.

show 2 replies
raspasovtoday at 9:22 PM

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.

testing22321today at 10:17 PM

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.