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Cake day: March 20th, 2024

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  • Large flat roads are also more efficient. Have you ever driven down a bumpy road? That shit aint efficient. All of your horizontal speed gets turned into vertical speed in a jarringly unpleasant way. That’s part of why trains are so efficient because their tracks are so smooth.

    Large wheels have nothing to do with a vehicles ability to go off road/on bumpy roads, if anything they’re counter productive because you want large soft tires and small wheels for that scenario.



  • What are you talking about? A solid wheel would perform horribly off road or on road in a gas or electric vehicle. You need some sort of tread and deformation to get any grip off road. And rubber is used because it deforms to the road and gives you a larger contact patch which gives you more grip. If you put solid wheels attached to a motor it wouldn’t take much effort to get them to slip in anything but the most ideal conditions. That’s why when people go off roading they get monster tires on tiny wheels and air them down until they’re ready to fall off.

    In a horse drawn wagon solid wheels make sense because the wheels aren’t driving the carriage the horse is. The horse can step over bumps and put its hoof on solid ground. A wheel can’t do that, so it has to comply to the road. The up side is the solid wheel has a lot less rolling resistance. Early EVs had solid wheels because that’s just what we had.