GregHowley.com

Michelin has a new kind of airless tire. They're called tweels, and the rumor is that they may not be far from the mass market. Just think... no more flat tires or having to check your tire pressure. Very cool.

Supposedly, these tires will have superior tread life compared to the old inflatable kind. Odd, given that the surface seems fairly thin, but I'll take it.

Michelin said the design freedom available without the need for air pressure allows engineers to tune Tweel performance characteristics independently of each other, which is a significant change from conventional tires. This means that vertical stiffness (which primarily affects ride comfort) and lateral stiffness (which affects handling and cornering) can both be optimized, pushing the performance envelope in these applications and enabling new performances not possible for current inflated tires. The Tweel prototype, demonstrated on the Audi A4, is within five percent of the rolling resistance and mass levels of current pneumatic tires. That translates to within one percent of the fuel economy of the original equipment fitment. Additionally, Michelin has increased the lateral stiffness by a factor of five, making the prototype's handling unusually responsive.

And I'll bet that those spike strips used by the cops, and the tire traps at rental car places won't work on the tweels either.

Some people have brought up concerns about snow or mud accumulating inside the tweel and unbalancing the tire, but I can only hope that Michelin will test their product out more thoroughly than Microsoft does before sending it into production.

You can see a video of the tweels in action on YouTube.