Last year, Goodyear introduced their spherical tire concept, a ridiculous idea that they imagined will be the perfect tire for the autonomous cars of the future. Well, apparently that wasn’t ridiculous enough, because they just dreamed even bigger this year with the Goodyear Eagle-360 Urban.
Like the original, it’s a spherical tire that looks more like a stability ball than the part of your car that makes contact with the road. It also still levitates the car chassis using magnetic fields (no, they don’t have any idea how to do that either), enabling the tires to have full maneuverability during driving, so your car can parallel park by simply moving sideways.
The Goodyear Eagle-360 Urban is made using a 3D-printed bionic skin with a network of sensors and radios embedded inside, allowing it to check on various things about its performance as well as automatically communicate with cloud services. Oh yeah, that skin can expand and contract at will, complete with a morphing tread that can automatically change to adapt to the needs of the terrain. When any part of the tire is punctured, it will automatically rotate to create a different contact patch with the road, all while starting a self-healing procedure that will seal the puncture back up to working conditions. Yeah, Goodyear’s spherical tire is still absolutely bonkers.
You can learn more about the Goodyear Eagle-360 from the link below.