Seems to me I heard/read something about this a while back but a picture is worth a thousand words. Pretty cool nonetheless. http://editorial.autos.msn.com/blogs/po ... on-new-atv
Wow! Ok, I feel old but not quite THAT old! Wonder why this didn't take off? Some tire company maybe bought the rights to this and shelved it...? Be interesting to see how it does on the quads...
I know there have been various companies experimenting with those since at least the 70's, but Rons link shows the idea was being played with in the 30's. wow. It's taken almost 80 years for someone to finally bring these to market......Let's see how they work in real life..
They may be successful in a niche market like low speed off road vehicles, but i don't see them being practical for the automotive mass market anytime soon, if ever. The design is incompatible with the 'high (and very high) offset' wheel designs required by 90% of all the cars made today (front wheel drive.) They are reportedly very rough riding and noisy at normal road speeds. Anything like snow or ice would put them out of balance so bad as to make them impossible to drive with and I'll bet in the cold weather they would be as pliable and ride about as plush as Fred Flintstone's car with stone wheels. The cost would likely be 10 times that of an ordinary tire/rim combination and who's going to pay that much for the extremely small chance of avoiding a flat on their car? On top of all that...they're fuglier than Kloe Kardashian. :?
:lol: All good points. Ya, a little bit of ice in there would wreak havoc at any speed. While I was sitting here (supposedly working) staring off into space and contemplating this, I wonder why they couldn't enclose this 'technology' into a tire which then wouldn't require air? A punture just wouldn't matter. Sure would be nice not having to worry about patches,tubes and air... Like you say though, it likely wouldn't be worth the price they would have to charge...
Wow, I had no idea that concept has been around for so long. You may have been thinking of this video Laird which made its rounds via email forwards about a year ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jYcX_D09ig
