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The supplier of Bridgestone car parts tests the advances of tires that never puncture, potentially smooth the path for more autonomous vehicles.
The Japanese company, which features with Michelin in France to be the largest tire supplier in the world, has developed an airless version which, according to it, can support a 1 ton vehicle driven 60 km from the hour, a large advance on the capacities of solid tires a decade ago.
New structures and materials compatible with computer have led to significant innovations to improve their performance at higher speeds and weights, making them suitors to replace pneumatic tires, as well as driver -free vehicles put a premium on safety and without stops.
But the enormous performance and benefits of tire tire costs make them extremely difficult to dislodge.
The new tires are tested on shuttles and tourist vehicles because Japan seeks to bring autonomous driving to rural communities to respond to the shortages of drivers and mechanisms. Innovation is also considered to be a potential differentiating in the middle of the Chinese and Indian competition.
“When we finally arrive at autonomous driving, there will be great value to prevent vehicles from stopping deep in the driverless mountains due to a refreshing tire,” said Masaki Ota, director of new business development at Mobility in Bridgestone.
IT simulations have helped create tires with a ray structure locked in a rubber tread, the rays capable of bouncing and bending at higher speeds and weights without becoming a drag on fuel consumption, driving and gentle safety compared to previous air tires.
The tires could mean a reduction in maintenance costs and a reduction in the risk of responsibility for autonomous driving accidents caused by perforations.
But the experts fear that the design, with production costs several times that of the pumped tires, can find it difficult to carve out a niche. Bridgestone also reversed the usual logic of innovation, first targeting low -performance vehicles for the mass market, instead of testing products in high performance races.
The replacement of all pneumatic tires with airless tires is “a utopia that will cost too much,” said Florent Menegaux, Managing Director of Michelin. The company has been working on air-free tires for 20 years and had already put its own version, called Tweel, on smaller vehicles such as lawns in the United States.
“To go from a lawn mower to a car, drive 50 km from the time, poses other problems,” he said. They include roar sound, the risk that the stones fly from rays and maintaining high -speed performance and weights over time, analysts said.
Michelin organized tests on its Uptis tires without punctuation and without air on small vans for DHL and La Poste delivery groups, but the rubber and aluminum wheels remain at a prototype stage.
Menegaux said that Michelin was “not ready from an industrial point of view” to go further, despite the “very happy” logistics groups.
Bridgestone hopes to assess customers’ desire to pay air -free tires through demonstrations, such as a six -seat autonomous car in a mountainous area in the city of Higashiomi in which more than half of the 309 residents are elderly.
“Honestly, we have not yet reached a clear vision of the quantity of this business and the type of market,” said OTA. “But we don’t expect to discover it.”
The incitement for the main outgoing Tyremakers is convincing. Their business model is threatened with cheaper Chinese and Indian competition, as tires have become merchants, and they lose approximately 5% per year of their total volume, according to Tire Industry Research, specialized advice.
Instead, tire providers want to develop in services. Customers would regularly return to the tires without warmed air – which should last 10 years against three to five for pneumatic tires.
“I do not yet know if they will work in terms of delivery of all the technical requirements of the lifespan, the fuel economy and the price that the world needs,” said David Shaw, CEO of Tire Industry Research.
But the success was more likely than elsewhere, he added, because “pneumatic tires are pain”.
