Smart Tires Are Coming From Pirelli and Bosch While Airless Tires Are Coming From GM And Michelin

The combination of Smart Tires and Airless tires will be a game changer for both the track and the road making car safer and spare tires a thing of the past.

Pirelli and Bosch have announced the development of Smart Tires in parallel with the effort to bring out airless tires for cars. The airless tires are being developed by GM and Michelin. So why Smart and Airless tires?

Airless Tires

It is interesting to note that tires kind of started out being airless but these were solid rubber that didn’t conform to the road and were very uncomfortable to use. The problem that airless tires solve is flats. We did have a technology called run-flat tires, but they were expensive, they couldn’t be patched if you got a leak, and if you had an all-wheel drive car, you needed to replace all four tires if you got a puncture (something I painfully learned in person). So, you traded off the need for a spare for a flat tire recovery cost of 4 new run-flat tires ($25 vs. $3K in my case).

Airless tires use rubber to replace the air and have no sidewalls as a result, this makes them unusual to look at, and they, like run-flats, require a special wheel. But these tires will take a lot more damage than an air-filled tire will take before failing and most will only be replaced when the tread wears out.

These tires will, like run-flats, be more expensive to buy but they should last longer and be safer to use. One problem, however, is that law enforcement currently uses spike-strips to deflate tires in order to stop somewhat safely fleeing drivers, spike-strips won’t work on airless tires but there are other, and arguably far safer, methods to stop fleeing cars. 

Smart Tires

It isn’t how much horsepower you have, but how much you can put down. With current technology, we mostly measure tire slippage, but we have no idea about the tire contact patch the material the tires is running on, or the detailed condition of the tire all necessary for a computer to determine how much power the vehicle can apply.

This is not only critically important on a track where just a little mistake can result in a very expensive experience, but on the road as well. For instance, a number of years ago, I was driving to a ski resort, and just as I and three other cars were about to turn left, we sequentially hit black ice, it was totally invisible, and when we each taped our brake to make the turn we each rotated to the left and proceeded to slide forward in a weird synchronized progression. Fortunately, were all going very slow, and we ended up not hitting each other or ending up in a ditch, but had we been going to the speed limit, we’d have totaled all three cars.

With ADAS (Advances Driver Assistance System) the car has a feature Toyota called Guardian Angel, which will come standard on any car with Level 3 or better Autonomous Driving capability. This allows the car to take control immediately should it be put at risk, for instance, if it hits black ice. The front tires hitting the ice would inform the ADAS system of the problem and then based on the speed of the vehicle, whether it was an incline or decline, and where the surrounding vehicles and obstacles are, it would be able to either stop before the rear tires were compromised or react in a way to minimize the risk to the passengers or vehicles. Otherwise, the system would wait until the tires started to slip before determining there was a problem and, by then, the car is likely to have become ballistic.

You can hit multiple surface areas when driving, gravel, oil, water, ice, sand, snow, or even grass may be your driving surface and while cameras on future cars will be able to pick up some of this, only something touching the driving surface can analyze exactly how much traction you have in order to fully inform the car’s ADAS system on how it should behave. 

Wrapping Up: Critical For Electric Vehicles

While these changes will help gas cars perform more reliably on mixed surfaces, they will even be more important for electric vehicles. This is because the nature of electric motors is that they can be adjusted thousands of times a second allowing them to micro-adjust for any conceivable surface. This capability should allow an electric car to make far more use of the traction it has with obvious benefits to the track and daily drive keeping us more competitive and safer in both modes.

Smart Airless Tires will be the holy grail of new tire designs, making spare tires a thing of the past, and more fully enabling the ADAS systems of the future.

Rob Enderle is a technology analyst covering automotive technology and battery developments at Torque News. You can learn more about Rob on Wikipedia, and follow his articles on Forbes, on X, and LinkedIn.