Yeah tires is probably one of the worst inventions ever. It spreads microplastics everywhere. The main purpose is traction.
Tarmac is bad too. Roads as a whole is a pretty bad solution.
It’s almost as if railways had everything right from the start.
The following is me ranting about a rather obscure theoretical idea, so please bear with me, or quit while you can.
Now, if we were to reinvent the entirety of transportation. Let’s imagine we rewind time to just before cars, but keep our current knowledge, are cars really the way to solve transportation? No. Just no. Imagine landing on a pristine foreign planet and the first thing we do is to pollute everything just to pave a road for transportation that also requires more pollution to use said road. It is just not right. The idea of "road’ comes from the predecessor of cars, carriages, and people sort of took that idea for granted and developed from there. I don’t even blame them.
Let’s go back to the imaginary planet, and rethink it without the idea of “road’”. How would we solve transportation? By redesigning the wheel. In order to make a wheel that could drive over off-road, we basically need something a lot more solid and durable than rubber. And we’d need engines that could easily and swiftly apply the correct force to the drivetrain to circumvent the uneven terrain. With current technology that would be solvable.
Guess what the first cars were? Electric and with huge solid wheels. The paved road and rubber tires are the result of a push towards combustible engines made by the oil industry. The 1800s electric car manufacturers were actually on the right path, they just didn’t have the technology or money to do it.
What are you talking about? A solid wheel would perform horribly off road or on road in a gas or electric vehicle. You need some sort of tread and deformation to get any grip off road. And rubber is used because it deforms to the road and gives you a larger contact patch which gives you more grip. If you put solid wheels attached to a motor it wouldn’t take much effort to get them to slip in anything but the most ideal conditions. That’s why when people go off roading they get monster tires on tiny wheels and air them down until they’re ready to fall off.
In a horse drawn wagon solid wheels make sense because the wheels aren’t driving the carriage the horse is. The horse can step over bumps and put its hoof on solid ground. A wheel can’t do that, so it has to comply to the road. The up side is the solid wheel has a lot less rolling resistance. Early EVs had solid wheels because that’s just what we had.
Plus a solid wheel transfers ALL the vibration
Just need to develop suspension instead of developing paving.
You’ve never driven over a shitty dirt road eh? Top speed is like 5mph, mud, ruts, potholes so deep you bottom out, etc
That’s pretty much the point. We could’ve had vehicles that could drive over rough ground, but they opted to make flat roads and rubber tires, both of which are causing issues environmentally and congestion.
My whole thought experiment is : If you were to settle a brand new world, would you repeat the concept of roads and rubber tires?
We wouldn’t bother with independent motorized transportation. It would be trains for between cities and public transit so ubiquitous that bikes would be exiled strictly for rural exploration outside of cities.
[Tire sales] are growing a little faster than the population, but still slower than the GDP [sad tire manufacturer noises]
Why should sales in a static (and resource intense and polluting) technology like tires grow faster than the population? Making money off the stock market seems kind of evil
EVs are still part of the solution, though. Not spilling gas all day long on every corner of the city would be a big deal.
