By some distance, the research Emissions Analytics published in early 2020 claiming that tire particulate wear emissions were 1,000 times worse than exhaust emissions generated the most feedback of any subject we have tackled so far – feedback that was a mixture of surprise and scepticism
That’s 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 exhaust emissions particles that are due to be emitted in the United States that don’t need to be. How? A large majority of European and Chinese cars are now sold with tailpipe particle filters, known as gasoline particulate filters (GPFs) or diesel particulate filters (DPFs) in the industry, but this is not the case in the US.
In a recent newsletter, we set out Schrödinger’s Car, drawing a parallel with the famous Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment, where a cat in a box is both dead and alive until the box is opened.
Tightening tailpipe regulations is a natural impulse in a post-Dieselgate world. However, we are in danger of over-regulating familiar, easy-to-measure emissions such as CO2 and NOx while ignoring a wide range of other, potentially harmful substances that can now be measured but have previously been ignored.
