See what Michelin uses instead of air in its Uptis tires
Car Tech
Speaker 1: Think about it. We have phones that can survive being dunked in the ocean watches. You can run over a cheese, grater and screens. You can fold without breaking, but any common nail can go into the tire of your car and hobble you on the side of the road. It's time for a change. Let's take a look at the coming Michelin up. This airless tire laughs at nails.
Speaker 1: Now Michelin along with much of the industry has been [00:00:30] sniffing around non pneumatic or airless tires for a lot of years. And for the most part, it kind of seemed like auto show fluff to me. But all of a sudden they're testing these things on public roads, working tightly with general motors and talking about a public release in 2024. The first thing you notice about this Michelin Optus is the sidewall you can see right through this thing. It's airless. There's no air chamber. There's no tube. Instead. You've got a series of these flexible curved veins that are made of glass [00:01:00] reinforced plastic, for lack of a better description that allow the tire to have some give where it needs it stiffness, where it needs it and ride quality. That would be varied by the design and composition of those vans. If a nail goes into an upness tire about the worst that'll happen is you'll hear that annoying clicking sound as it goes around until you yank the nail out and the benefits of crew from there, for example, there is no tire pressure to check. I've been asking you to do this for years and you still don't do it no more. Jack [00:01:30] TPMS technology, spare tires or tire inflater kits all jammed into the back of your car. And up this tires are being designed at the same time that electric cars are flourishing, which means that they can be designed to handle that unique to fork that comes from EVs almost unheard of in any other car, except for a very few exotics or really heavy duty commercial vehicles.
Speaker 1: And like all big corporate brands. Michelins got a green angle to this story. They say that up to tires when widely spread in the market in the [00:02:00] future can keep up to 200 million tires out of global landfills due to two main factors. One, all those times you get a flat from a cut in the side wall on today's tires. That's usually unre repairable. It might even be a new tire. It gets tossed or tires that are inflated in property that wear wrong and they get thrown away. When they're young, those two factors they say could roll up to that 200 million tires, save number that's big. And of course around this rosy story, I have questions. What will these tires cost? They're [00:02:30] new technology. They're gonna cost more. What's more, can you retrofit them on today as alloy wheels? We love our wheels, right? We invested in them in many cases, we know which ones we want on our car.
Speaker 1: They look great. I don't wanna get rid of these to get a different and kind of tire. What are these things gonna sound like at freeway speeds? The majority of noise coming off that highway is not engineer exhaust it's tire contact noise. I would like up to, to sound the same or ideally quieter. And can these new tires or their unusual [00:03:00] dynamics be used with today's stability control and abs and other systems? Or is there anything about the way that tire moves on the wheel? That's gonna fool those systems and cause issues. All of these are T B D. They don't roll out to market for a few more years, but they're starting to get imminent and let's face it. It's been a long time. And since the late 18 hundreds, when this kind of tire was invented, we due for a change.
