Goodyear did not disclose details as to what materials it’s using for either the shearband or connecting web.
Goodyear views its work with autonomous vehicles as particularly poignant, Rachita said, since having a maintenance-free vehicle is critical to municipalities’ ability to offer transport-as-a-service (TaaS) strategies.
With an airless tire/wheel system, there’s no need to check pressures, which in turn eliminates the need for regular monitoring, he said, and the structure of a non-pneumatic tire/wheel unit means that a vehicle can keep running even when something goes wrong.
“Redundancies are important,” Rachita said. “Take autonomous shuttles, for example, they have LiDAR and they have GPS, if either of those were to fail, they have optical cameras to fall back on. This means there are a number of backup systems to make sure the vehicle can perform well.
“When a tire is based on air pressure, the tire has no backups. If you were to get a rapid loss of air or have an integrity issue with the tire, the vehicle stops and can’t continue to work.”
A non-pneumatic tire/wheel unit, however, does offer such fail-safes. Because of the connecting web structure, the tire can still operate as normal, even if something happens to it.
Physically, the Goodyear non-pneumatic tire/wheel assembly resembles the Group Michelin Tweel, which debuted publicly in 2005 and which is targeted for commercial readiness by 2024 in partnership with General Motors Co.
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Article includes independent input from Tire Business staff
