One of the biggest complaints that reviewers have with car interiors is the excessive use of hard, ugly plastic. The 2025 Audi Q5 and SQ5 are beautiful, and pretty good, our Andy Kalmowitz wrote, but piano black plastic is “all over the center console, screen bezels and even a little control switches on the driver’s door.” He added that the 2025 Chevrolet Blazer SS is a normal family crossover with supercar speed that “has far too much hard plastic in common contact points”. If you look closely, you can even find plastic in the Mercedes-Maybach GLS 600 of 2025.
But it turns out that comfort and aesthetics are not the only problems: all that plastic throws small, small particles – microplastics – and they are stuck in the cabin with you and your passengers on each disk. The problem is of course that breathing those microplastics can be extremely dangerous for human health. The Center for International Environmental Law points to a long list of problems associated with microplastics, including pneumonia, chronic bronchitis, chronic pneumonia, emphysema and more.
Scientists started to study how microplastics people have a relatively recent influence, so there is still much to learn about their ultimate effects. But now there is clear evidence about how high your risk of exposure is when you are stuck in the closed limits of the cockpit of a car.
There can be many more microplastics in a car than a house
Scientists in France recently conducted a study in which the air was sampled for microplastics, both in homes and in auto interiors, and they used actual tests in the vehicle, not just computer modeling. They write in the Peer-Reviewed Jouennal Plos One That air was checked while the cars were driven on long and short journeys, on motorways and in the city, “closed with the windows and a medium -sized current outdoors in the car via frontal ventilation openings.”
The result? On average, there were around 2,238 particles of microplastics tested in every cubic meter of air in the vehicle cabins – which you do not tell much until you compare it to the findings of the scientists in houses and apartments. Around 528 particles were discovered there per cubic meter of air. In other words, there were more than four times the amount of microplastic particles floating around the interior of your car than sampled in the same volume of air from homes.
At the same time, people are in their cars – together with all those microplastic – for a little more than an hour a day according to a survey carried out by AAA. And that is just the average. According to information analyzed by Autoinsurance.comIn 2024, 3% of drivers were confronted with the home -working traffic of two hours or more a day, and another 5% had a commuting between one and two hours. The cabin is also not the only source of microplastics of your car.
Where else is plastic used in a car?
Selling cars is sometimes called the movement of the metal, but nowadays that is not exactly accurate. New cars are currently around 50% plastic per volume (and around 10% plastic per weight). After all, the engine room of your car is a plastic mess, car manufacturers have switched to plastic oil stirlages and RAM’s plastic control arms are also in the news.
However, it is car tires that are responsible for almost 30% of all microplastics that are found in the area as a whole. A large part of the problem is that more than half of the “rubber” in car tire-66%now is synthetic, which means that it comes from oil-based hydrocarbons instead of rubber trees, which means that it is made of the same stuff as plastic. A bit lost with every rotation of every tire, and the heavier your vehicle, the faster tires tend to wear out.
Unnecessary to say, with so many relatively heavy vehicles on the road – such as SUVs, trucks and EVs – the potential for increased tire pollution increases. Electric vehicles can, for example, weigh 20% more than their counterparts with gas and because of their tires are about 20% faster. The fact that EVs are generally faster than gas models makes it even worse, at least in terms of shifting microplastics. So maybe there is something about the incredible wooden EV of this child.
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