This may take some explaining....

If you look at the raciing bycycles, you will notice one groove in the middle. It is the only contact with the road when inflated to about 90 psi. Not a comfortable ride, but the rolling resistance is very minimal.

This leads to the question of how to practically adapting this to cars. If someone could devise a safe way to get a car tire to go from nine inches of thread on the pavement to one inch, the rolling resistance would be greatly reduced. Of course, the only place to do this would be open roads.

Wear considerations would be the greatest concern after safety....

61.5mpg lifetime - 82mpg in recent months

Best Run >
www.cleanmpg.com

"fanatic" is what the lazy call the dedicated

As soon as cars can lean 30-45 degrees in to the direction of the turn, that should work great.

that's pretty much the same thought as skinny tires in general. Its also why street rods have very skinny tires in front. less area contacting and therefore resistance...with reduced handling and increased wear

you can only go so skinny with rubber and expect to be able to maneuver a 1-2 ton object at any sort of speed. Watch a street rod try to turn- pretty amusing as long as you're not near them. There's got to be enough area to absorb lateral acceleration without slipping. Unless you bank it.

The ideal tire would be a average width tire that normally rode on a very narrow footprint of hard rubber, with most of the tire's tread lifted and out of contact with the road. But when you provided lateral stress on the tire (in the form of accel, braking, or cornering), the cords/plys in the tire's rubber carcass would cause it to deform and flatten out to provide a wider footprint of softer rubber for the period of time that the stress was in effect, then afterwards relax back to the narrow footprint mode. This type of tire would provide good cornering/braking with minimal rolling resistance.

What I think might be promising is the Tweel... http://www.michelinman.com/differenc...01102005a.html

2001 Prius Photos       2005 Prius Photos
1992 Mitsubishi Delica Diesel-WVO Hybrid Photos

the tweel looks very promising, but one major problem testing revealed was that it created excessive road noise near or at highway speeds. i still want to be able to listen to my tunes while i'm on the road, so, although i'm excited they made progress, i'm anxious also for them to solve this noise problem.

quoted from a cbs news article back in january of this year:
"On a test drive on tweels, a sedan handles well enough. The biggest problem is noise, once the speed hits about 50 miles per hour. The noise gets worse the faster you go."
click here for full article


other than that, the tweel looks great, spec wise and physically. another cbs quote:

"Other changes include no more deadly blowouts. The tweel is durable. Forget a nail, an armored vehicle with tweels can go over an exploding landmine and keep moving."

pretty impressive.