Impact of vehicle type, tyre feature and driving behaviour on tyre wear under real-world driving conditions

Tyre wear generates not only large pieces of microplastics but also airborne particle emissions, which have attracted considerable attention due to their adverse impacts on the environment, human health, and the water system. However, the study on tyre wear is scarce in real-world driving conditions. In the present study, the left-front and left-rear tyre wear in terms of volume lost in mm3 of 76 taxi cars was measured about every three months. This study covered 22 months from September 2019 to June 2021 and included more than 500 measurements in total. Some of the data was used to evaluate the effects of vehicle type and tyre type on tyre wear. In addition, a machine learning method (i.e., Extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost)) was used to probe the effect of driving behaviour on tyre wear by monitoring real-time driving behaviour. The current statistical results showed that, on average, the tyre wear was 72 mg veh−1 km−1 for a hybrid car and 53 mg veh−1 km−1 for a conventional internal combustion engine car. The average tyre wear measured for a taxi vehicle configuration featuring winter tyres was 160 mg veh−1 km−1, which was 1.4 and 3.0 times as much as those with all-season tyres and summer tyres, respectively. The wear rate of left-front tyres was 1.7 times higher than that of left-rear tyres. The XGBoost results indicated that compared to driving behaviour, tyre type and tyre position had more important effects on tyre wear. Among driving behaviours, braking and accelerating events presented the most considerable impact on tyre wear, followed by cornering manoeuvres and driving speed. Thus, it seems that limiting harsh braking and acceleration has the potential to reduce tyre wear significantly.