The Truth About Electric Car Tyres

So you've got an electric car and that means you need EV specific tires, right? No, wrong! Anyone who's telling you that, walk away from them, they don't know what they're talking about. If it's a tire company, shop, tire fitter that's trying to upsell you on EV tires, do some research and educate yourself before you pay the additional premium for EV tires. Let me run you through a few of the facts and figures and bits and pieces so you can get a better understanding. Straight up front, I'm going to apologize if this gets a little bit ranty, I can't help it. So if we jump onto some of the manufacturer's websites, Michelin up front, they tell you why they claim that electric cars need special tires and it talks specifically about the extra vehicle weight, the torque and the noise and the battery drain or the efficiency of how inefficient some of these tires can be and some of them can offer more resistance. But then, you know what? All Michelin tires are suitable for EVs. It's not that they have one specific line of EV tires but they admit that all of them are suitable. So where does that leave us? Bridgestone is a similar thing, sorry if my head's in the wrong place. Bridgestone, it's a similar sort of thing, increased weight, reduced the noise and then the torque that comes with it. They actually minimize the claim of efficiency in Bridgestone's case. Continental, again, it's the same sort of claims that they're all making. Pirelli make the same, Kumho, Fulda, Hanker, you name it, all of their websites. It's all the same thing and this is the summary of the claims. EVs are heavier, EVs produce more torque, EVs need the increased efficiency and because EVs are quiet inside, you notice the tire noise more than you would on a normal internal combustion vehicle. So is there any merit to these claims and how much of a difference does it actually make in the real world? So here's a few examples and some of this you may look at and think, that's a bit extreme, some of the examples I've gone for here. But as you can see, my own MG5 is about 1600 kilos. There's another vehicle that's exactly the same size as mine which is also 1600 kilos, give or take a couple, and that vehicle has a lot more torque than the MG5. Now I know this will be a questionable one but we'll come back to that. The Tesla Model Y rear-wheel drive is about two tons, the Porsche Cayenne S is heavier and that's the base model Porsche Cayenne that is heavier than the Tesla Model Y rear-wheel drive and that once again has more torque. So when we talk about the instant torque from electric vehicles, that is true, but really there is the potential that electric vehicles can deliver more torque more rapidly to the tyres without feeding that power in. But it's very much to do with our right foot and some of the software calibration and we're seeing that more and more in EVs. Some of the first generation ones, they were quite brutal and a lot of wheel spin on some of those front-wheel drive cars, a bit scrabbly, and more and more a lot of the EVs are feeding the power in a lot smoother and so you don't have that instant connection between your right foot and the front wheels. They drive more like internal combustion engine vehicles. Now of course that's all down to your control and your driving style. If you drive like a maniac you're going to eat through tyres. That's the case for internal combustion engine or EV, there's no difference there. If you drive like the vicar on the way to church then you're going to get much better. So if we have a quick look at an example tyre, this is a 225 55 R17 tyre, a very popular size used on lots and lots of vehicles. You can have a quick look at the load rating which is this number at the end here if I'm circling in this Hankook Ventus and then you can also see the speed rating. So you'll notice that some people are saying that EV tyres need to have a higher rating but once again they're all 101, doesn't really matter which one you look at. For quick reference this is what the difference is, a 97 rated weight rated tyre is 730 kilos per tyre and that's 2,920 kilograms overall spread over the four tyres. Assuming that there will be a perfect weight distribution in the vehicle and compare that to a load index of 101 which would be 825 per tyre and 3,300 kilograms for the vehicle overall. It doesn't matter how much you're going to load up your two tonne Model Y, you're never going to have a 3.3 tonne Tesla Model Y. A load index of 101 is more than enough and we're not looking at EV specific tyres here. And the different letters here you've got a W or a Y in case you weren't aware that's the speed rating but these days it's pretty much irrelevant for us here in the UK because if you want to get the Y rated you could drive up to 186 miles per hour if you step down to the budget W rated ones then you can only do 168 miles per hour. What a shame, worth paying the extra just in case you want to up it from 168 miles per hour up to 186. I think this point somewhat goes to show how over engineered modern tyres are and even the basic ones are so over the top for what we use them for unless you're going racing and unless you are incredibly enthusiastic when you're driving in the wet then any tyres are going to do the job for you and it's just up to you to decide which you prefer. For me personally the one aspect that I look at more than a lot of these other factors is the noise. I'm a lot more conscious of noisy tyres and quiet tyres on an internal combustion vehicle but also on an EV. We can see in these ratings over here that this Goodyear tyre is 70 decibels the quietest tyre here so I would be drawn to having a look at that. It's not the most expensive tyre it's also not the cheapest tyre but we could have a look down here and you can see that also some of these budget tyres seem to perform very well on the EU ratings and so even we've got 70 decibels 72 decibels the range is relatively small all modern tyres are becoming quieter and quieter. Okay so let's talk about efficiency then so you can go on to the VCA website this is the section that we need to pay close attention to because it's about tyre labeling and it talks about first of all in terms of rolling resistance there is a 7.5 degree loss 7.5 percent loss of fuel economy for a full set of tyres fitted to an average car the tyre labeling regulations rank tyres on a scale from A best to G worst on both fuel efficiency and wet grip whereas external oh we don't need to worry about noise for now we'll come back to that so the difference between A and G is potentially a 7.5 percent loss but everyone quotes this and you can find this on tyre websites absolutely everywhere but is this even relevant well there's a couple of things first of all the EU dropped the F&G rating since May 2021 so they're only rating tyres between A and E now anyway and a quick scan on black circle's website and also on tyre leader have I got it up here somewhere if you put in for most sizes you won't find any vehicles that are rated below a C for efficiency anyway it's this little one here fuel consumption and you can see the vast majority A's B's and C's and it doesn't matter if you're going for super cheap or super premium one there are complete mixes of A, B's and C's everywhere you look but you won't find any E's and there's occasions where you might find a D but it doesn't really seem relevant to worry about the 7.5 percent difference between A and G tyres because we just can't even buy D, E, F, G tyres anyway so it would be better if they showed what is the percentage difference between an A to a C tyre I thought this was an interesting way of demonstrating it you can download this from the EU website and this is a little calculator with some macros in here that can help us understand what the actual difference would be so you put in up here the current tyres that you've got let's say we're going from C rated tyres up to A rated tyres and then you put in how how you drive you put in your annual mileage which is 10,000 miles 16,000 kilometers five liters per 100 kilometers is just over 40 mpg from memory and diesel and then the current price and it shows over those 10,000 miles how much have we saved we have saved a total of 50 euros or less than 40 pounds so that's for a set of four tyres going from C rated to A rated so will we ever see our money back is that money that's wisely invested in more expensive tyres I don't know ultimately we need to have a look at the marginal gains and the diminishing returns and then we need to make a judgment and it's fine if we choose to spend more money on more premium tyres as long as we're doing so from an informed position and we're making an informed decision the biggest factor for efficiency it isn't the tyres that are on your vehicle it's your right foot you the driver your driving style your driving habits that is what is going to save you more fuel or save you more watts of energy from your electric vehicle than any tyre ever could my conclusion for this video is just that you need to be informed don't let anyone pull the wool over your eyes I'm coming to the conclusion that tyre manufacturers have spotted a market opportunity and they've seized upon it there is some independent testing data around that does show you some of the marginal gains have a look through the tyre reviews website it is an absolute minefield they actually have this really good article about everything you need to know about the EU tyre label which does show you how they measure the rolling resistance and how they label the tyres and how you can see that there's not necessarily a huge difference between the A to C rated tyres they also have a 2024 EV tyre test performed on a Kia EV6 and interestingly not all of the tyres that they tested on here are EV specific tyres I think there's one or two that are just regular tyres and still outperform EV tyres in some areas so it's an interesting read if you want to get really geeky and you want to get into the data of it you'll see that the difference between the worst performing tyre and the best performing tyre is in a lot of cases is actually very small in the real world so if it's the difference between 4 miles per kilowatt hour and 4.1 miles per kilowatt hour how long and how many miles is it going to take you to recuperate that cost apologies for a little bit of a rant but I've seen online that tyres and the issue around EV specific tyres is one of the stupid things that the anti-EV brigade want to wave their flags about and they want to try and beat us with a stick over ridiculously expensive tyres when that's completely unnecessary and completely untrue and so if we can continue to spread the message that actually it doesn't matter any tyres can be fitted on any vehicle these days and you yes if you buy the cheapest least efficient tyres you'll pay a small price in efficiency and sometimes in a little bit of your wet or dry grip but those factors are exactly the same for petrol or diesel cars as well thanks for watching if this video has been helpful then give us a thumbs up if you made it this far then you probably want to consider subscribing to my channel because I have loads of ridiculous insights and rants on strange stuff like this thanks for watching goodbye