• fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    3 months ago

    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.

        • winkerjadams@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          3 months ago

          You’ve never driven over a shitty dirt road eh? Top speed is like 5mph, mud, ruts, potholes so deep you bottom out, etc

          • bstix@feddit.dk
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            3 months ago

            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?

            • PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml
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              3 months ago

              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.