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.

The energy efficient tires for my Chevy EV are $800 for a set of 4. You're paying the luxury car parts tax.

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.

Isnt that because it has crazy torque, AWD, and high weight?

Same thing with ebike tires vs normal bike tires

Are the wheels a weird size? What stopped you from replacing them with regular tires?

most of a passenger car's performance and handling is its tires

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.

> 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

> 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.

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.

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.

Same. It seems like they will just give them one leaf marking and not outlaw them outright, though?

Can you get LED lightbulbs you like online?

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

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.

So normal US background noise?

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.

> If a tire is "inefficient" and therefore "bad", why can't California just ban the sale of them? Instead there will be a new government funded office and rating system

Isn’t it doing both?

I understand how the article could make it sound like they're doing some kind of complicated matching process, but what California is doing here is pretty close to just banning the sale of them. They're establishing the rolling resistance coefficient as the state's official measure of tire efficiency, attaching a leaf ranking to different ranges, and through 2031 phasing in maximum values which tires must meet to be sold.