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The supplier of auto parts Bridgestone tests the progress in tires that never score and may smooth out the path for self -driving vehicles.
The Japanese company, which with France Michelin for the largest tire supplier in the world Vies Vies, has developed an air-free version that can support a 1-ton vehicle with 60 km per hour, a great step forward to the skills of solid tires a decade ago.
New computer-capable structures and materials have led to considerable innovations to improve their performance at higher speeds and weights, so that they make candidates replace pneumatic tires, just like driverless vehicles for a bonus for safety and no stopover.
But the enormous performance and the costs of the pneumatic tires make it extremely difficult to remove them.
The new tires are tested with shuttle buses and tourist vehicles when Japan wants to bring autonomous driving to rural communities in order to satisfy the lack of drivers and mechanics. Innovation is also seen as a potential distinction feature in the middle of increasing Chinese and Indian competition.
“When we finally get to autonomous driving, it will be of great importance due to a burst tire if vehicles without a driver are deep in the mountains,” said Masaki OTA, Manager of Bridgestone’s New Mobility Business Development.
Computer simulations have contributed to creating tires with a spoke structure included in a rubber profile. The spokes able to jump and bend with higher speeds and weights without drawing fuel consumption, a smooth drive and safety compared to previous airless tires.
The tires could mean lower maintenance costs and a reduced risk of liability due to autonomous driving accidents caused by puncture.
However, experts fear that the design with the production costs could fight several times as high as the tires pumped up to get a niche out. Bridgestone also has the usual logic of the innovation and first aims with low performance vehicles for the mass market instead of testing the products in the high-performance race.
It is “a utopia that will cost too much,” said Florent Menegaux, Managing Director of Michelin, all pneumatic tires through airless tires. The company has been working on Airless tires for 20 years and has already put its own version called Tweel on smaller vehicles such as Lawnmowers in the USA.
“To go to a car from a lawnmower to drive at 50 km per hour, there are other problems,” he said. This includes a buzzing sound, the risk that stones fly out of the spokes and maintain performance at high speeds and weights over time, according to analysts.
Michelin has carried out tests about his punny, airless updis tires on small vans for the DHL and La posts delivery groups, but the rubber and aluminum wheels remain in a prototype level.
Menegaux said Michelin was “not ready from an industrial perspective” to get it further, although the logistics groups are “very happy”.
Bridgestone hopes to measure the willingness of customers, to pay air -free tires through demonstrations, e.g.
“To be honest, we have not yet achieved a clear idea of
The incentive for the most important reigning tyremas is mandatory. Their business model is threatened by cheaper Chinese and Indian competition, since the tires lose about 5 percent per year of their total volume, according to Tire Industry Research.
Instead, tire suppliers want to be expanded in the services. Customers would regularly take 10 years to return to renovated air-free tires, compared to three to five for pneumatic tires.
“I still don’t know if you are working on fulfilling all the technical requirements of the lifespan, fuel consumption and the price that the world needs,” said David Shaw, Managing Director of the Research of the Tire Industry.
But success was more likely than not, he added, because “pneumatic tires are pain”.
