EVs are heavier but I suspect the wear is less than you might think because the braking is gentler with regenerative braking, so less wear on the tyres.

Also, there's quite a bit of pollution from break pads and discs, also reduced because of regenerative braking.

I couldn't find numbers though, with a brief bit of googling.

I’m not sure it’s gentler or in any way different from a tire’s perspective than braking. If I pull my foot off the one pedal driving, the deceleration I get is fairly comparable to about 3/4 braking in an ICE. (Off the top of my head estimate for illustration purposes only.)

But the tires are made of different materials and are different in other ways too. I can tell you first hand you spend far more on tires if you own an EV. Our model y spends more on tires than our giant diesel pickup, and far more than an ICE of similar size. As for the relative amount of microplastics they emit, I really couldn’t know.

You definitely wear your brake pads out far less with an EV. Just eyeing it though, volumetrically, brake pad wear has to be relatively insignificant compared to tire wear.

I’d guess EVs still emit substantially more tire particles, and fewer from brakes but nowhere close to compensating. But I’d not be shocked to death if someone studies it and you turn out to be right.

And on the plus side, those are probably issues materials science could solve (make the tires out of something benign) whereas EVs emit a lot less of other bad things that I’m sure are not easy to solve or they already would have been.

Your hypothesis then, roughly, is that braking causes more pollution when it's more extreme (since the total braking work being done is at least as great -- in practice much greater because of the increased mass), so smoother braking will reduce tire wear.

I'm inclined to believe an extreme version of that hypothesis -- I doubt 200k miles at 1mph would wear the tread substantially -- but in practice I don't think that's the case. Electric cars tend to replace tires around 10k miles sooner, so the net effect of everything involved (heavier cars, regenerative braking, rich young guys driving faster, mostly city driving, ...) is 15-50% more tire wear per mile.

Pretty sure most wear comes from the back tires (I should say the "power tires" to consider FWD vehicles). Many electric vehicles accelerate quite quickly, which just wears their tires even more.

Braking is braking. If you're stopping in N meters, regardless of how the braking force is applied (regenerative brake vs discs), the tire is the artifact taking the load.

Even then, most cars don't routinely brake as hard as they accelerate.

Motorcycles, with their high performance, are notorious for eating rear tires much faster than front tires, and they can't be rotated.

Then, there's my vehicle, full time 4WD (not AWD, there's a difference), it wears its tires quite evenly in contrast to 2WD/AWD vehicles.

My EV runs through tires way faster than my gas car.

I'd say it's slightly worse, mainly because when you first get the car you tend to launch it a few times and take advantage of all the power. My first set of tires only lasted 27k miles.

After a year you drive normally, I get about 35k miles out of 40k mile rated tires, similar to my old Audi.

My wife doesn't buy that argument. To her, when I have regen braking on, we slow down a lot more than we would otherwise with the brakes. It could just be the way I'm driving though.