I came across VENTRA and, as someone working in air-quality measurement, this immediately caught my attention.
VENTRA is the latest concept car developed by TU/ecomotive, the student team of Eindhoven University of Technology. It will be presented at Dutch Design Week 2026 as an electric vehicle designed to tackle something that is easy to overlook when we talk about clean mobility: non-exhaust particulate emissions.
That is a subject very close to what we do at AAVOS.
We work with environmental and process analysers, measuring what is actually present in the air and in industrial processes. So when a group of engineering students asks a very simple question — what if we could reduce or capture the particles produced by the vehicle itself? — it is difficult not to take notice.
Electric does not mean particle-free
The environmental discussion around electric vehicles has understandably focused on the fact that they have no tailpipe emissions while driving.
That is a major difference compared with conventional combustion vehicles.
But a vehicle does not stop producing particles simply because its engine has been replaced by an electric motor.
Every vehicle still interacts with the road. Tyres wear. Brake components wear. The road surface itself wears. These processes generate what are generally referred to as non-exhaust emissions.
And some of these particles are small enough to become airborne.
This is where the story becomes more interesting.
The weight problem
One of the challenges of battery-electric vehicles is weight.
Large battery packs add substantial mass, and a heavier vehicle places greater loads on its tyres. That can contribute to increased tyre wear and therefore increased tyre-related particulate emissions.
The effect should not be reduced to a simple equation such as “20% more weight means 20% more particles”. Real-world emissions depend on many factors, including tyre design, road surface, speed, acceleration, cornering and driving style.
Nevertheless, experimental research has found higher tyre-wear emission factors for heavier electric vehicles. One experimental comparison, for example, found the tyre tread wear rate of an EV to be around 1.2 times that of comparable internal-combustion vehicles, in line with its approximately 20% greater mass in that test.
More recent on-road research comparing electric and conventional versions of the same passenger car reported 7.6 ± 4.2 mg/km of tyre-and-road-wear particles for the EV versus 5.8 ± 1.9 mg/km for the ICE vehicle — approximately 31% higher in that particular comparison.
That does not mean every EV produces 31% more tyre particles.
It does show, however, why vehicle mass is becoming an important part of the air-quality discussion around electrification.
But brakes tell a different story
This is where the picture becomes much more nuanced.
Electric vehicles can use regenerative braking. Instead of converting all the vehicle's kinetic energy into heat through friction between brake pads and discs, part of that energy can be recovered and stored in the battery.
Less friction braking means less brake wear.
Research has found substantial reductions in brake-wear particulate emissions when regenerative braking is used. One recent study reported reductions of approximately 75% to 87% for brake-wear PM2.5 and 90% to 95% for PM10, depending on the regenerative braking mode.
So an electric vehicle can simultaneously have:
more tyre-related particle emissions because of its mass, and substantially less brake-wear emissions because of regenerative braking.
That is why broad statements such as “EVs produce more particulate matter” or “EVs solve particulate pollution” are both too simplistic.
The reality depends on which particles we are talking about.
And what about ultrafine particles?
This is particularly interesting from an air-quality perspective.
When we talk about particulate matter, we often use regulatory categories such as PM10 and PM2.5, based on aerodynamic particle size.
But combustion is not the only process producing very small particles.
Tyre wear and brake wear can also generate particles across a broad size range, including very small particles. Research into non-exhaust emissions increasingly looks beyond PM10 and PM2.5 towards particle number and ultrafine or nanoscale particles.
There is still significant scientific work to be done before we can translate every type of tyre- or brake-wear particle into a precise health-risk number. The composition also matters: these particles can contain rubber, silica, metals and other chemical constituents.
In other words, “zero tailpipe emissions” does not mean “zero particulate emissions”. It means we have removed one important source.
This is where VENTRA gets interesting
VENTRA takes a different approach.
Rather than simply accepting tyre particles as an unavoidable consequence of driving, TU/ecomotive has designed the vehicle around three ideas:
reduce, capture and change behaviour.
First, reduce the source.
VENTRA weighs just 790 kg, with a chassis of 135 kg and a carbon-fibre-reinforced thermoplastic structure. The underlying idea is straightforward: if you can reduce the mass acting on the tyres, you can potentially reduce tyre wear before you need to capture anything.
Second, capture what is still generated.
VENTRA uses its T.R.A.C.E. system to collect tyre particles close to the wheels. According to TU/ecomotive, simulations indicate that more than 24% of released tyre particles can be routed into the collection system at speeds between 50 and 80 km/h. In city driving, where airflow is lower, active fans increase the simulated capture rate to 42%.
These are concept-vehicle results and simulations, rather than evidence that the same capture rates have been demonstrated across normal real-world driving conditions. But the engineering principle is compelling: deal with the particles close to their source rather than allowing them to disperse into the surrounding environment.
Third, VENTRA considers the driver.
Its Clean Drive interface provides feedback intended to encourage smoother acceleration, braking and steering. That matters because driving behaviour also affects tyre wear.
Why this matters to people working with air quality
For me, this is the most interesting part of VENTRA.
Air-quality monitoring has traditionally focused heavily on what is already in the air.
We measure concentrations.
We identify pollutants.
We monitor trends.
We try to understand exposure.
But there is another question we can ask:
Can we prevent some of those pollutants from entering the air in the first place?
That is a very different way of thinking about environmental control.
In industrial applications, we routinely try to capture pollutants at or near their source. We use sampling systems, analysers and control technologies to understand and manage emissions before they spread.
VENTRA applies a similar principle to road transport.
Instead of asking only how clean the vehicle is after emissions have occurred, it asks whether the vehicle itself can be designed to produce less particulate matter and capture some of what remains.
That makes it much more than an interesting student concept for me.
It is a small but very visible example of where the discussion about air quality could be heading.
The next challenge for clean mobility
The transition to electric mobility is often presented as a simple switch from combustion to electricity.
In reality, it is a systems problem.
Energy consumption matters.
Battery materials matter.
Vehicle mass matters.
Tyres matter.
Brakes matter.
Road surfaces matter.
And, ultimately, so does the air around us.
VENTRA does not claim to solve all of these problems. Nor should a concept car be treated as a finished production solution.
But it asks the right kind of question:
If we know that vehicles still produce particulate matter, can we design the vehicle so that less is generated — and more of what is generated is captured?
As someone working in environmental and air-quality measurement, I find that question particularly relevant.
At AAVOS, we work every day with instruments that measure what is in the air. VENTRA is interesting because it asks a complementary question:
What if we could prevent or capture some of those particles at the source?
That is why I will be keeping an eye on VENTRA at Dutch Design Week.
Sometimes the most interesting pollution is the pollution we cannot see.