If margins are so thin, how do they afford all those restaurant critics?
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2024
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Yeah tires is probably one of the worst inventions ever. It spreads microplastics everywhere. The main purpose is traction.
Tarmac is bad too. Roads as a whole is a pretty bad solution.
It's almost as if railways had everything right from the start.
The following is me ranting about a rather obscure theoretical idea, so please bear with me, or quit while you can.
Now, if we were to reinvent the entirety of transportation. Let's imagine we rewind time to just before cars, but keep our current knowledge, are cars really the way to solve transportation? No. Just no. Imagine landing on a pristine foreign planet and the first thing we do is to pollute everything just to pave a road for transportation that also requires more pollution to use said road. It is just not right. The idea of "road' comes from the predecessor of cars, carriages, and people sort of took that idea for granted and developed from there. I don't even blame them.
Let's go back to the imaginary planet, and rethink it without the idea of "road'". How would we solve transportation? By redesigning the wheel. In order to make a wheel that could drive over off-road, we basically need something a lot more solid and durable than rubber. And we'd need engines that could easily and swiftly apply the correct force to the drivetrain to circumvent the uneven terrain. With current technology that would be solvable.
Guess what the first cars were? Electric and with huge solid wheels. The paved road and rubber tires are the result of a push towards combustible engines made by the oil industry. The 1800s electric car manufacturers were actually on the right path, they just didn't have the technology or money to do it.
What are you talking about? A solid wheel would perform horribly off road or on road in a gas or electric vehicle. You need some sort of tread and deformation to get any grip off road. And rubber is used because it deforms to the road and gives you a larger contact patch which gives you more grip. If you put solid wheels attached to a motor it wouldn’t take much effort to get them to slip in anything but the most ideal conditions. That’s why when people go off roading they get monster tires on tiny wheels and air them down until they’re ready to fall off.
In a horse drawn wagon solid wheels make sense because the wheels aren’t driving the carriage the horse is. The horse can step over bumps and put its hoof on solid ground. A wheel can’t do that, so it has to comply to the road. The up side is the solid wheel has a lot less rolling resistance. Early EVs had solid wheels because that’s just what we had.
Plus a solid wheel transfers ALL the vibration
Just need to develop suspension instead of developing paving.
You've never driven over a shitty dirt road eh? Top speed is like 5mph, mud, ruts, potholes so deep you bottom out, etc
That's pretty much the point. We could've had vehicles that could drive over rough ground, but they opted to make flat roads and rubber tires, both of which are causing issues environmentally and congestion.
My whole thought experiment is : If you were to settle a brand new world, would you repeat the concept of roads and rubber tires?
We wouldn't bother with independent motorized transportation. It would be trains for between cities and public transit so ubiquitous that bikes would be exiled strictly for rural exploration outside of cities.
Early EVs and horse carriers had large wheels because the roads and paths where dirt or cobblestone.
My point is that, if they had simply said "okay, that is the condition that we need to accept, adapt to and solve" like we do today with tarmac roads taking for granted, they could have developed a vehicle to do that. It would probably have larger wheels and soft suspension, but the only reason cars are shaped as they are today is because they didn't solve it back then.
What happened instead was that low torque combustible engines were subsidized and rolled out on the condition that tarmac roads were also provided by the state. This was largely due to bitumen being a biproduct from petrol production. The oil industry pushed for both combustible engines and tarmac because they could supply both.
My previous rant is basically just entertaining the idea of what we'd do today if posed with a similar challenge. Roads are absolutely taken for granted and tmwe will never be able to undo that. It might be relevant if we ever inhabit another planet, but the last I read was that road planning had already begun on the moon..
Large flat roads are also more efficient. Have you ever driven down a bumpy road? That shit aint efficient. All of your horizontal speed gets turned into vertical speed in a jarringly unpleasant way. That's part of why trains are so efficient because their tracks are so smooth.
Large wheels have nothing to do with a vehicles ability to go off road/on bumpy roads, if anything they're counter productive because you want large soft tires and small wheels for that scenario.
Are you seriously suggesting that more advanced propulsion and suspension systems would eliminate the need for traction?
Have you ever ridden a bike on just the rims?
It sucks. And I don't mean just in terms of comfort. There's a reason mountain bikes with the most advanced suspension systems still need soft knobbly tires in addition to their suspension systems to do what they do.
Trains and trams are far more efficient large scale transport options, but cars and smaller personal transport options like scooters and bicycles have their place, too. Despite our current over-reliance on them, they aren't useless. There are use-cases where they are the best option. The same goes for the tire.
The compliant tire is the best option for an off-rails vehicle. No, suspension cannot replace it, not in terms of cost (and I don't mean money, I mean materials and energy) and especially not in terms of functionality.
That's not how wheels work.
You can't just ignore traction and claim you can make an effective vehicle of any kind with materials that don't wear if only sufficiently advanced propulsion and suspension were applied.
Even on skateboards, warehouse vehicles, and similar, the wheel isn't just a solid cylinder of metal or some other non-compliant low-wear material.
It's a hard hub, wrapped in plastic, or rather, polyurethane. A compliant grippy material that serves a very important purpose in improving the performance of the wheel. You can't replace a compliant wheel material with somehow better suspension. You still need it for grip, even on perfectly flat surfaces.
Trains make up for their low traction (and therefore high efficiency) with slow steady acceleration/deceleration and extreme weight. Their design principles cannot be applied to personal vehicles, which do serve their own purposes.
I'm just waiting for the moisture farmers to get landspeeders
[Tire sales] are growing a little faster than the population, but still slower than the GDP [sad tire manufacturer noises]
Why should sales in a static (and resource intense and polluting) technology like tires grow faster than the population? Making money off the stock market seems kind of evil
EVs are still part of the solution, though. Not spilling gas all day long on every corner of the city would be a big deal.