The Goodyear facility in Luxembourg has designed the most futuristic tire yet. It is just a concept and doesn’t actually exist for now, but the company presented the idea recently at the Geneva Motor Show in Switzerland nonetheless. The company calls it a “concept tire” designed to “trigger a debate on the tires and transport technologies for a new mobility ecosystem.”
Inspired by what appears to be a possible shift from conventional automobiles to flying cars, Goodyear has come up with a tire that doubles as a propeller. According to NBC News MACH, “Goodyear’s Aero tire is designed to support the weight of a vehicle while driving and then tilt horizontally so its spinning bladed spokes can function as a tiltrotor to provide lift and forward propulsion for flying.”
The Aero concept tires are still circular and rotate around a hub. However, they are airless. Solid flexible rubber, that can absorb any bumps in the road as air-filled tires do, is wrapped around fanlike flexible spokes. Daniel Hinque, a Luxembourg-based Goodyear engineer involved in the tire’s development, said in a promotional video:
“The individual blades absorb shocks while driving on the road but also act as robust rotors to create vertical lift when the tire is tilted.”
The best part about these tires is how they can enable the car to shift from driving to flying without stopping. A futuristic Aero-equipped vehicle would be able to go speeding down a highway as one wheel and then the others tilt to the horizontal position and the vehicle takes to the air. The company explains that “with capable vehicles, the AERO would give future commuters the freedom to move seamlessly from the road to the sky.”
But of course, not everyone is convinced that the two-in-one tire will take off. Pat Anderson, director of the Eagle Flight Research Center at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, said:
“Melding two components into one might offer the advantage of reducing the number of parts in a flying vehicle. But, combining things typically results in a lot of compromises. You’ve seen cars that are supposed to turn into boats, but it’s not a good boat or a good car.”
He also adds that he doesn’t see why travelers would want to drive at all when they could fly. “I would just fly to where I wanted to park,” he said.
Ella Atkins, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan, thinks differently. She called the tires innovative and she said in an email to NBC News MACH:
“It would be great to use the same transmission to turn the thrust-generating blades in flight mode that turns the rolling wheels in car mode.”
But then she concluded her statement by jumping over into the skeptics boat – adding in that its airless design reminded her of the solid rubber tires used in the early days of automobiles. “I’m sure new technology can improve handling and stability, but there will be limits,” she said. “How safe and efficient can a car be with ‘Model T tires’ in car mode even with 21st Century sensors and electronics?”
Goodyear’s concepts are meant to trigger a debate on the tires and transport technologies, and from what it seems, they definitely have accomplished that with this Aero concept.
