Arriving at road.cc in 2017 via 220 Triathlon Magazine, Jack dipped his toe in most jobs on the site and over at eBikeTips before being named the new editor of road.cc in 2020, much to his surprise. His cycling life began during his students days, when he cobbled together a few hundred quid off the back of a hard winter selling hats (long story) and bought his first road bike - a Trek 1.1 that was quickly relegated to winter steed, before it was sadly pinched a few years later. Creatively replacing it with a Trek 1.2, Jack mostly rides this bike around local cycle paths nowadays, but when he wants to get the racer out and be competitive his preferred events are time trials, sportives, triathlons and pogo sticking - the latter being another long story.
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Is there any update on this ?
Commenters - you do realise that the pictured wheel is an automotive application?
Would love to see the real world effects of wind on these....
aero effects could be amazing (in a bad way) but I reckon you could probably wind them up to sound like a jet engine if you tried!
so people don't drive to work because they worry about getting punctures?
Car tyre punctures are extremely rare. I haven't had one in over a decade. Covering the same mileage, my bike tyres puncture at least 5 times a year.
Huh?
Theyre pretty rare - the sort of debris a bike tyre picks up all the time from makes little difference to a car tyre.
In 35+ yrs of driving, I've only once had a car flat, and in the case of my OH, one or zero in 20yrs and a lot more mileage.
On a cycle commute of 2-4 times a week -once or twice a year. And I'd usually only find out as I went to leave.
So not a deal breaker, but a PITA. Many people already use heavier tyres for commuting because of better puncture resistance - and some aren't very good at swapping tubes either (the same applies to car wheels)
Michelin and others have been working on these for a long time for car and truck use also bikes - have a look on YouTube for examples and have a look at this for some radical-looking bike tyres: http://www.energyreturnwheel.com/ERW-Bicycle.aspx
What you lose with these systems is the ability to tune the pressure on the fly - some systems seem to allow you to change the elastomer stiffness, but it's not a trivial job that can be done in a few minutes or at the roadside.
Looks like if would necessitate disk brakes...
There are perfectly good uses for airless tyres. Heavy-duty weight bearing wheels on slow moving machines, or the sort of metro trains that run on tyres, for instance.
When will the manufacturers work out that bikes are not one of those use cases?
Hopefully never and eventually crack the code on light, fast, puncture free tyres.
Not really a tyre, more like a whole new wheel!
Would you be able to replace the wornout contact surface, or do you have to discard the whole thing?
It would be interesting to see how this design will cope with the side loads experienced when cornering too.