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The vendor of the Bridgestone car parts tests the progress in tires that never break through, potentially smoothing the trail for more vehicles driving on their own.
The Japanese company, which is with French Michelin, as the world’s largest tire supplier, has developed an air -free version, which she says can support a 1 toning vehicle rides at 60 km per hour, which is a big progress compared to the options of solid tires a decade ago.
New computer structures and materials have led to significant innovations to improve their performance at higher speeds and weights, making them competitors who will replace pneumatic tires just as drivers without drivers put a premium on safety and without stopping.
But huge performance and costs of pneumatic tires make them extremely difficult to remove.
New tires are trial on buses and tourist vehicles, as Japan tries to bring autonomous rural communities to resolve the lack of drivers and mechanics. Innovation is also considered a potential differential due to growing Chinese and Indian competition.
“When we eventually reach an autonomous driving, there will be a great value in avoiding the vehicles to stop deep in the mountains without driver’s driver,” said Masaki OT, manager of the new Business Development Mobility Mobility Bridgestone.
Computer simulations helped creating tires with a speech structure in a rubber tread, with spokes capable of bounced and bent at higher speeds and weights without withdrawing fuel consumption, smooth driving and safety compared to previous airless tires.
Tires could mean lower maintenance costs and a reduced risk of responsibility from autonomous accidents in driving caused by breakthroughs.
But experts are afraid to make the design, with production, several times it cost the turkey tires, to fight to throw out the niche. Bridgestone also turned the usual innovation logic, targeting the first place for a mass market, instead of testing products in high performance races.
The replacement of all the airless tires without air is “utopia that will cost too much,” said Florent Menegaux, Michelin CEO. The company has worked on airless tires for 20 years and has already put its own version, called Tweel, on smaller vehicles like Lackhowers USA.
“Going from the root to the car, driving to 50 km per hour, pursuing other problems,” he said. They include the sound that spins, the risk of stones flying from the spokes and maintains performance at high speeds and weights over time, analysts said.
Michelin started experiments on its tires without breaking, without air, on small vans for DHL and LA poste delivery groups, but rubber and aluminum wheels remain in the prototype phase.
Megaux said that Michelin “was not ready from an industrial point of view” to take it further, despite the fact that logistics groups were “very happy”.
Bridgestone hopes to evaluate the readiness of customers to pay the tires without air through demonstrations, such as a six -sister -in -law car driven in the Higashiomi mountain area, with more than half of the 309 people of the elderly.
“We honestly have not yet achieved a clear vision of how much this job will do and what kind of market it will be,” Oh said. “But we’re not waiting for us to find out.”
The incentive for the main duties of Tiremaker is convincing. Their business model threatens cheaper Chinese and Indian competition because the tires have become comfortable and lose about 5 percent of annual overall volume, according to tires research, specialist consultation.
Instead, tire suppliers want to expand into services. Customers would regularly return to the renewal of the tires without air-it will be said that it will last for 10 years compared to three to five for pneumatic tires.
“I still do not know if it will work in terms of delivery of all technical demands of life, the economy of fuel and the prices that are needed for the world,” said David Shaw, Executive Director for Tire Research.
But success was more likely than not, he added, because “pneumatic tires are pain.”
