Goodyear Eagle-360
What if your car tires were intelligent? What could they achieve? Those were the kind of questions designers and engineers at Goodyear were grappling with when they were looking at ways to well, reinvent the wheel.
The result: the Eagle-360 spherical tire (below). Introduced at this year’s Geneva Motor Show, the invention is just a conceptual development at the moment, and it might take years, even decades, before it finally hits the roads. But we can dream though, and Goodyear has given us good reasons to do so.
“Goodyear designers thought about a tire shape that could revolutionise the industry in terms of safety and passenger comfort. To deliver that, Goodyear’s industrial designers proposed a new tire shape that is spherical, delivering ultimate connectivity and manoeuverability, and making use of materials inspired by nature,” said Vivian Zhang, Goodyear’s communications executive.
The Eagle-360 transforms itself according to your driving habits and the typical road conditions that you’ll be travelling on. For example, if you live in a city that’s beset by thunderstorms, the tire will soften to “create deeper grooves for aquaplaning resistance”. Hot and dry? The tire hardens for better driving performance.
Zhang explained that the Eagle-360 will connect with the car’s body using magnetic levitation, providing an unparalleled level of comfort to the vehicle’s occupants, as they won’t be able to feel every bump on the road. But the best bit about these tires is that they can communicate with other vehicles about traffic and road conditions so that your intelligent car can plan for the journey ahead.
Unfortunately Zhang revealed that Goodyear is not planning to produce the Eagle-360 as showcased. However, “parts of it, and the ideas that generated it, will become the basis for new ideas and potentially new products”. We can’t wait for that day, when we can parallel park with ease.