Information on how weight impacts tire tread life is not easy to find. I haven't done a ton of research yet, but most reports are just anecdotal statements about weight affecting tread life without any backing data to support the claims. I don't doubt it has some affect, but the question is how much?
Companies building EV-specific tires may have other criteria they are trying to meet, such as a quieter tire. However, a lot of these are choices, not required consequences of the vehicle being electric. You can put any tire on an EV. This is why I think weight is really the only metric to consider on this question.
Even then, we need to keep some perspective. What do you compare a Tesla Model 3 or Tesla Model S to? There is no gas powered Tesla Model 3 or Model S to compare against. So you have to pick cars of similar class from other manufacturers, and in some cases, the EV is the same weight or only marginally heavier; in other cases, it might be a lot heavier.
We can then look for cases where a vehicle has both a gas and electric variant. Although there are not many cases of this, and in these cases the electric variant is usually disadvantaged further by being shoe horned into a chassis originally intended for gas.
In general, we need to come up with an average for what percentage weight increase there is when going from gas to EV and then apply that to what the weight impact on tread life is. I'm trying to determine the weight/tread-life impact first. I'll keep looking for more information. I'm avoiding sources that are specifically addressing EVs, as those are ripe for bias, and instead I'm trying to just look generically at how vehicle weight affects tread life with actual experimental data to back it up.
