You might have heard people say that EVs are “too heavy” and are causing damage to our roads. It sounds logical; EVs are heavier than gas-powered cars due to their batteries. So it’s an easy jump to assume that more weight must mean more wear and tear on our roads.
But, the engineers who study this say: not really.
What Actually Damages Roads?
Road engineers use something called ESALs to measure road damage. That stands for Equivalent Single Axle Load, which is a fancy way of comparing how much different vehicles stress the pavement.
To keep it simple:
- A fully loaded semi-truck is the baseline and equals 1.0 ESAL
- A typical gas car is just 0.0004 ESAL
- An electric sedan is about 0.0005 ESAL
That means a single semi-truck does more damage than 2,000 passenger EVs.
- A big SUV or pickup truck is around 0.01 ESAL
- A heavy EV like a Ford F-150 Lightning? Also about 0.01 ESAL
So even the heaviest EVs still do 1/1,000th the road damage of a semi-truck.
Why Weight Isn’t the Whole Story
Pavement damage increases exponentially with weight. The math looks like this:
Double the weight on an axle = 16 times more pavement damage
So even though EVs are heavier than gas cars, they’re nowhere near the weight of a loaded semi-truck.
Yes, EVs weigh more than traditional cars. But they don’t come close to generating the wear and tear that people assume. Even if every passenger car were electric, the impact on road wear would be negligible compared to the wear already caused by trucks every day.
So next time someone says EVs are wrecking the roads, you can confidently say:
“Actually, engineers measure road damage using something called ESALs, and EVs barely move the needle.”
