Quote:
Originally Posted by Frank Lee
Regardless of Mythbusters, even if a particular bike model and car model got identical fe, the bike used about 1/5 the materials to make, especially oil-based plastics. There's a lot of emissions in manufacture and disposal too.
|
There are, but sooner or later they're trumped by rubber use. A bike usually goes through something like three to six times more rubber than a car. IIRC it's something like an extra ~150-300 lbs per 100k miles, which is equivalent to the same weight in plastic or about three times that weight in steel.
For a bike that goes through tires in a reasonable amount of time, say ~15k-20k per set, the comparison isn't too bad because it only reaches the embodied energy of the car after a few hundred thousand miles, but a sport bike that goes through those tires in half the time or less will add the energy equivalent of a half ton of steel every ~100k or so.