Goodyear airless tire/wheel assembly on a Tesla sedan during recent testing in Luxembourg.
COLMAR-BERG, Luxembourg—Goodyear has set a goal of having an airless passenger tire/wheel commercially ready by 2030, company officials signaled at a recent press event at Goodyear's European technical center in Colmar-Berg.
In a review of its development work on airless tire/wheel units, Goodyear said it was aiming for street-ready, Department of Transportation-approved applications for its airless technology while admitting that this goal was still several years away.
The target "is to produce the first 100% sustainable material and maintenance-free tire on the market by 2030," Michael Rachita, Goodyear's senior program manager for non-pneumatic tires, said, during the media event in Colmar-Berg, where a selected few consumer media representatives were given the opportunity to test-drive Teslas equipped with the airless tire/wheel units.
Goodyear has been testing its airless tires globally for the past few years at its proving grounds, while at the same time evaluating the concept in real-world conditions on robo-shuttles and micro-delivery robots.
The former is part of a project with Jacksonville Transportation Authority (JTA) and autonomous vehicle developers Beep Inc. and Local Motors Inc. to transport limited numbers of people around Jacksonville, Fla.
A Goodyear airless tire/wheel assembly in use on an 'Olli' eight-passenger autonomous vehicle, as operated by Local Motors.
The latter involves a much smaller vehicle, "a micro-delivery robot, which delivers small packages such as coffee, " Rachita said, noting that the micro-delivery robots are being used in the U.S., United Kingdom and Estonia.
So, he said, "we are getting outside our proving grounds and putting them out in the market."
While pneumatic tires "are not going away any time soon," the Akron-based tire maker said airless models offered new opportunities, especially in a world of rapidly changing transport technologies.
"As transport is being reimagined, it's time for tires to be reimagined in a similar way," Goodyear said, listing maintenance-free operation, increased comfort with heavy loads and reliability among the advantages of airless tires.
This, it said, applied particularly for autonomous vehicle and transport-as-a-service applications, while airless models would reduce the waste-stream associated with tires - by not being scrapped early due to issues such as punctures.
Goodyear's airless tire structure comprises three components: a "shearband," which includes the tread; a "connecting web"; and the wheel.
The "connecting web," it explained, is the most critical element as, in combination with the "shearband," it supports the weight of the vehicle and gives the feel of a pneumatic tire.
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.
Tire Business staff contributed to this article.
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