There is no reason to be skeptical of this claim. ICEs are very noisy during acceleration. City traffic is very start-stop by its nature. Even in Dutch cities, even if you replace every single traffic light with a roundabout. EV engines are incredibly quiet when you put them next to each other.

In many cases, we're just very used to it especially because it's a "low rumbling" kind of noise. But it still affects us.

While true (beyond 30-50km/h), that assumes that cars are driving at a steady state. Obviously, cities with much more stop-and-go require more revving of engines.

Acoustic tyres are also gradually becoming the norm, primarily with EVs. This cuts noise by several decibels.

So it's not an unreasonable claim per se.

Source? That sounds dubious. Here in USA you hear blazing engines constantly, I’m skeptical a rubber tire is louder than that

I'm sure it's coming. I'm in Mexico this week and was surprised to drive by not one but two chinese car dealerships. Looks like almost 10% of cars sold last year were EVs

Inversion layer there will still trap ev particulate unfortunately

1/4-1/3 EVs is an underestimate for somewhere like Shenzhen (probably for Beijing too). It's going to be well over 50% there. And virtually all scooters will be electric.

You're right about the smoking, though. It's a massive problem.

Birds adapt their song to ambient noise conditions. This paper [1] studies the Pearl River Delta (where Shenzhen is) as a natural experiment. It shows spectral changes in the target species correlating to background noise levels. I haven't looked hard enough to make sure there isn't a study that does find complexity changes but it's certainly clear that noise can affect bird song behavior generally.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235198942...

I want to say this with the caveat that I am generally a person who always contends with the contradictions of living in a capitalist-imperialist country and my own distaste for it. So this doesn't come from a place of American exceptionalism writ large, but I am a firm believer the we did get this part right:

Public lands and culture of the ability to access wild places, whether for hunting, fishing, hiking, camping, and just generally an affordance of access to wilderness that is codified into the laws of the country. In Europe they have the concept of "Right to Roam" which is a powerful concept that I appreciate (and in ways is superior to our systems for just walking in the woods) but it is also fundamentally different than the almost legalistic systems we have in this country towards public lands.

My surface understanding of China is that there is no such broad remit given to the people of China and there aren't designated places where the people of China can just go and exist in wilderness. Such places might exist by convention but they don't have the sort of legal framework that we have in America to recreate in these places.

They don't come close to the variety and quality of cosmopolitan dining you can get in major American cities. A lot of FOBish Chinese people I've met won't even venture too far outside of Chinese cuisine when going out to dinner.

Software. Music.

Universities

Liberal arts, Hollywood and the associated soft power, increasingly prevalent onlyf___ etc.

Private aviation.

many things:

indoor smoking ban actually working

you don't need passport and prior booking to visit every single tourist sight

car registration process, good luck in Chinese major cities, even EV won't help you anymore

those come first to my mind

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I live in Tokyo, and the air is not that clean close to highways: large diesel trucks pollute a lot, and also small motorbikes/scooters pollute horribly because they don't seem to require any emissions controls at all.

The main thing keeping the air clean here is the proximity to the bay, along with the fact that there just aren't that many private cars in the first place, since most people take public transit and don't drive because there's nowhere to park.

Woah hold on there. Where is the evidence for both increased dust and increased pollution levels?

EVs generate next to no brake dust due to regenerative braking, most EVs have mechanisms to forcefully use the friction brakes at some points to stop surface rust for this reason.

It's true they're generally heavier than the equivalent ICE vehicle, but this is usually around 200-300KG heavier - it causes a small increase in tyre wear and associated particulates but these are heavy large particles - the majority larger than pm10. That's a problem for water courses and micro plastics but nothing that'll get in your lungs or bloodstream. Anecdotally, my EV tyres (a particularly heavy model too) have lasted fine - my last set did 53k miles.

ICE cars produce plenty of pm10s, pm2.5s and smaller particles as well as nitrogen oxide, carbon dioxide and plenty of other harmful pollutants that EVs inherently don't. Even the power generated for them is usually produced away from the majority of the population.

This claim keeps circulating around and around and is not "EVs are producing more pollution", it's "if EVs are going at motorway speed, and if we only look at the pollution generated by the tires, then indeed they produce a little more".

But that's completely ignoring tailpipe emission, and the fact that in an urban setting it's still vastly more advantageous to drive an EV.

See https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trd.2025.104622

Where did you get the idea that EVs have caused it? As far as I know the amount of road dust from EVs is within the same ballpark so the claim that it has led to overall higher pollution levels sounds inconceivable. I can't even find sources that indicate high pollution levels in Oslo besides a Bloomberg article that says the situation has actually improved in recent years. [1] On the contrary Oslo seems to be doing comparatively well according to the air quality data from iqair. [2]

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-11/why-oslo-...

[2] https://www.iqair.com/us/norway/oslo/oslo

On the other hand the EVs produce no exhausts and less harmful particles from using their brakes.

This sounds like a nice problem to have. Most of the world lives cities blighted by ICE pollution.

Thats' why you need light EVs. Norway has electric tanks. China has light EVs.