Should Tesla 're-design the wheel' for CyberTruck?

[Crissa]

That would be grounds for divorce in my book! No way, no how! I've experienced enough 100 plus degree weather to want to search it out!

She lets me get creative with the insulation and carry as much water as I need. It's why I have a solar set and a 134 amp hour LFP battery in a Mazda 3.

If I didn't indulge her, she wouldn't indulge me ^-^

-Crissa

 

[JBee]

Most Cybertruck owners will never drive a single mile in rural Western Australia.

You'd be surprised how many Aussies have them on order. It's coming for sure. When is a different question.

But that doesn't avoid the main point of my argument re spare. If you need it for work and not recreation, you can't choose when you need to use it as easily as saying I'm going to stay home.

 

[go99s]

How come both of my two threads end up being dominated by discussions about BEARS???
What percentage of even CTOC is ever likely to have to deal with a bear, let alone the rest of the world!
Give me a break guys...

 

[JBee]

How come both of my two threads end up being dominated by discussions about BEARS???
What percentage of even CTOC is ever likely to have to deal with a bear, let alone the rest of the world!
Give me a break guys...

Because you mention your pop up soft camper that is apparently not compatible with bears?
That is of course unless you intend to feed them.

 

[Morning Star]

Bears can smell a tire up to a mile away. They train their young from birth to attack and destroy all tires on sight. If you even THINK of driving a car with tires into bear country, you'd better think again.

Here's video of two bears fighting for the honor of eliminating their most vicious natural enemy. WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT

 

[go99s]

Because you mention your pop up soft camper that is apparently not compatible with bears?
That is of course unless you intend to feed them.

OK, guilty as charged ; ) but I'll leave the feeding of bears to North Americans, in Thailand its mosquito's that feast on me and in the UK, I can't think of anything, except maybe bankers!

Still waiting for that nugget of genius from CTOC members that might get Tesla to actually look at the hub, wheel, tyre combo?

I'm still thinking that there could be something that enables a fabulous on-road efficiency with an off-road performance competence when required from the same item. A pneumatic tyre is unlikely to do so, but an air-less one with speed-related shape shifting from the 'wheel' element could do. For example, the outer structure of the wheel spokes could result in them directing their rotational mass towards pushing out the central road optimised section of treads to reduce the contact area and thus behave more like a 'steel wheel tyre' at higher speeds but leave the softer outer section almost in contact with smooth pavement at lower speeds. On softer terrain, the lugs and outer tread pattern engage despite the central section protruding fractionally more so. You don't typically drive at 60mph off-road!!!

 

[Ogre]

How come both of my two threads end up being dominated by discussions about BEARS???
What percentage of even CTOC is ever likely to have to deal with a bear, let alone the rest of the world!
Give me a break guys...

I spend a lot of time in the woods in places where bears are common.

I suspect very few folks who spend a lot of time in the woods worry overmuch about bear attacks. Only reason bears break into vehicles is to get at food. Don’t keep food in your truck… Voila! Your truck is bear proof!

The only bears that bother me are the ones on Wall Street.

 

[Morning Star]

Still waiting for that nugget of genius from CTOC members that might get Tesla to actually look at the hub, wheel, tyre combo?

You might be happy to hear Joe Rogan asked Elon Musk about airless tires on his podcast show.


tl;dw: It’s not easy and probably not feasible yet.

 

[Cybertruckee]

That would be grounds for divorce in my book! No way, no how! I've experienced enough 100 plus degree weather to want to search it out!

Don't go camping in Pinnacles National Park in summer where where temperature swings by 46 degrees and just going out of the RV even mid morning is hell. And we thought we can do a little hiking.

Death Valley is definitely fall and Las Vegas is just passing through.

 

[AlexD]

To follow on from firsttruck's comments:

Tyre deformation, that is how much the tyre changes shape around the contact patch to the ground, is the primary cause of rolling resistance. Hence a steel train wheel on a steel rail has less such deformation and therefore less rolling resistance.

Airless tyres are predominantly a gimmick for off road use only where punctures are a problem. Anything caught in the side wall openings of those airless tyre will cause such a imbalance in the wheel at highway speeds that the vibrations would make it un-driveable.

A much better option is CTIS (Central Tyre Inflation System) where you can change and refill air in pneumatic tyres. Tesla apparently poached Mercedes Unimogs CTIS engineer and made some patents recently, so I'm super hopeful we'll see it, at least as an option on the CT because it is a game changer.

CTIS solves a bunch of problems with tyres.

Punctures, adapting tyre pressures to terrain and surface conditions, flotation for sand and snow, optimal pressure for highway cruise rolling resistance, adaptability to vehicle loads per wheel etc.

But there is limited scope for using tyre air pressure to deform tyres to the degree required to change the part of the contact patch of the tyre with the road that exposes different tread patterns. The reason is that most modern tyres are designed to have fairly rigid sidewalls and a flat tread across the bottom. You can embed some extra tread on the sidewall so when you deflate it for offroad, but otherwise its fairly limited on road.

I remember a while back someone suggesting the same sort of thing to improve wheels and tyres to EM, and his response was that they are already highly optimised and in particular cost effective components, that can only be incrementally improved.

In saying that I had some ideas around how to "reinvent the wheel" some decades ago, but never got it is past an simple proof of concept. It was a combination of flapping "flying carpet", hovercraft and alternating track deformation that combined the best properties of each, that used the incoming air underneath the vehicle as a air cushion, and also as a skirt to provide traction as required. Anyways, something for another day.

When comparing a train and a truck freewheeling to a stop, doesn't the difference it weight, (therefore difference in kinetic energy) play a big part?

 

[JBee]

When comparing a train and a truck freewheeling to a stop, doesn't the difference it weight, (therefore difference in kinetic energy) play a big part?

Rolling resistance is a term used to describe the force required to overcome the moving parts of the wheel over a surface.

Free wheeling, or coasting to a stop, is the process of reducing the vehicles potential energy by converting it's kinetic energy into other forms of energy, by way of rolling and aerodynamic resistance.

So in comparison the exact same vehicle mass would roll further on a rail with steel wheels than on a road with rubber wheels. This is because the rolling resistance is less.

For example: If it where aerodynamic drag imagine one had a sail (the road) and one didn't (the rail) and which one would stop first.

 

[FutureBoy]

How come both of my two threads end up being dominated by discussions about BEARS???
What percentage of even CTOC is ever likely to have to deal with a bear, let alone the rest of the world!
Give me a break guys...

 

[FutureBoy]

If you are too lazy to take a second shot at a grizzly, for the love of God, please don't take the first one. I don't care if your handgun is super-duper macho and neither does the grizzly. The low velocity and relatively large caliber of the .45 ACP makes it a poor choice when it comes to stopping a mature grizzly, so shot placement is still key. It can work but it would be one of my last choices. Another marginal round like 9 mm would be a better choice because it will have more follow up shots and it's easier to get good shot placement with multiple rounds. But I wouldn't mess around with a 9mm either unless it's all I had with me at the time, neither one are considered good grizzly protection.

 

[HaulingAss]

How come both of my two threads end up being dominated by discussions about BEARS???
What percentage of even CTOC is ever likely to have to deal with a bear, let alone the rest of the world!
Give me a break guys...

If I were you, and I'm not, I would be overjoyed that they weren't bears of the TSLAQ type!

Not only is it worse if your thread is taken over by TSLAQ bears, but it's also more common.

I've been around a lot of bears in the wild, most often at distances of 50-100 yards but several times as close as 10-30 feet, both Grizzlies and Black Bears. Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Alaska, California, they are all over. It seems like N. American bear populations are increasing so it won't be uncommon for people that use their Cybertruck for recreating to find themselves around bears.

 

[LoneWolfO6]

To cut-to-the-chase, my opinion is that Tesla should absolutely consider a 'First Principles' evaluation of the hub, wheel and tyre for CyberTruck.

We have not really changed car wheels, other than the transition to alloy for the wheel structure verses steel, for about 100 years.

For almost all vehicles we still use a pneumatic inflated rubber tyre mounted on a wheel that then mounts onto a hub using threaded fasteners. Yet, Formula 1 and some other race cars have advanced hub/ wheel mounting systems, several of the worlds premiere tyre companies have air-less prototype tyre/ wheel systems (often protected by patents but I'm sure they would 'partner' with Tesla) and finally, we could have the opportunity to have the tyre/ wheel combo behave dynamically in response to the huge variety of load cases that they are subjected to.

For example the current prototype air-less wheels use internal structures to provide bump absorbtion whilst retaining lateral stiffness but I feel sure that Tesla engineers could develop that to include speed related fuctionality such as creating a smaller contact patch at higher (60 - 90mph) speeds to reduce friction but that would flatten back out instantaneously on braking. The moment you lift off the accelerator, the load map within the wheel/ tyre combo changes, even more so if you then apply a braking force. I recently watched a video suggesting using wider tyres on a Tesla MY to improve NVH - which had me attempting to think like Tesla!! (Youtube: The Automotive Fanatic, watch?v=szSAnY59A_Q)

Another scenario is for the central tread pattern, contact patch and rubber formulation to be optimised for smooth pavement which would give reduced rolling resistance for range improvements and for the outer quarters to be optimised for off-road. In normal road use, especially at speed, the outer sections of the tyre might barely touch the road and thus reduce friction and road noise. These outer quarters, made with a softer compound, more suitable for softer terrain, loose gravel and dirt are able to engage with the ground on softer surfaces... You could even have an active element (equivalent to the partial deflation of regular off-road pneumatic tyres) that can switch between smooth pavement and off-road optimisations.

However, I am not suggesting that any of the above content is anything other than a template for the sort of discussion that I would be interested in hearing about as I am certainly no expert on hub, wheel or tyre design. So please try to avoid your reply simply being a hit-job on me!

I would be interested to hear what others on the forum think about this. With CyberTruck, we are soon to have the most revolutionary vehicle in the last 100 years, I would love to see it with equally revolutionary hubs, wheels and tyres.

Kind regards, Go99s.

Think it would be great and work once we get the Cibertruck, (Tyre’s vs Tire’s) cruising on Mars with with assistance of less gravity? Not so much on Earth asphalt roads. Lol.