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uoaei 12 hours ago

Asphalt is a petroleum product, so it's not irrelevant. But even so you're missing some physics in your comment.

Considering that friction is symmetric, road wear implies tire wear and vice versa, at roughly the same order of magnitude of severity, relative to respective hardnesses. Tires are generally softer than road surfaces, so they wear faster than roads.

vel0city 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> Asphalt is a petroleum product,

Uhh, what? Not all roads are asphalt, tons aren't. But even then that's irrelevant. If I made the tire out of Vaseline would it have the same wear characteristics? After all it's also made of petroleum.

Road wear isn't just about the friction. A lot of it is the stresses of the road surface being squished into the ground and deformed. If you've ever seen a boat planing over the water, the road surface kind of wants to make a similar pattern but due to rigidity it can't quite do that. So the internal stresses of the system of the road surface are pretty radically different than the layers of a tire being stretched and pressed into an air bubble.