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Behold The Hyundai Uni Wheel. Transportation May Never Be The Same
(cleantechnica.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
How are brakes needed more regularly? Most of the braking a normal driver would do is done by the motor(s). Sure, the vehicle is heavier than a similar sized ICE counterpart, but I would guess a typical driver is using one-pedal driving whenever possible. Anecdotally, I have an Ioniq 5 and brake almost exclusively with regen, whether it's I-pedal, or shifting between the four levels of regen when decelerating from higher speeds.
Because they rust when you not use them and always use regen. And most BEV drivers do not "maintain" their brakes, as they do not brake more vigorously to free the rotors of rust. There's a limit as to how much wear/grooves your disc can have and at least for many Teslas that's one of the reasons why they fail their first TÜV check up after 3 years. (Not to mention the horrible quality of Tesla suspension and chassis components...)
Volt owner checking in. I do one pedal driving 95% of the time and you're right. My brake disks are in rough shape because they see so little use.
You can't always use regen as it doesn't stop the car quickly enough in many cases. From my own experience, regen probably gets used about half the time when braking.