It’s tires. Saved you a click.
In equally shocking news, eating Cheetos turns your fingers orange.
Wow! Startling new information! It’s not as if people have been talking about this for years. Or is it?
No shade OP it’s just a silly headline.
I thought it was glitter
This is why all cars would be better if they took the tires off and just used bare metal rims on the pavement. That might be hard to control though so maybe we should create metal grooves in the road so they can follow their tracks. And at that point we could just automate the whole thing and people wouldn’t need to drive for themselves
But seriously though, in hindsight, the invention of asphalt roads was a mistake. The oil industry doesn’t just own the production of fuels. They also own the production of materials for roads and tires.
If we were to reinvent the car using contemporary knowledge, materials and technology, we would have to use something else for both cars, tires and roads.
Or we can wait 50 years and let our grandchildren deal with it when the oil has been depleted.
Going into fiction, if we were to settle on another planet covered with plants and natural resources, I seriously doubt we would be able to justify what we did to the Earth when we paved the roads. We only use roads because we upgraded the existing dirt and rock trails used by horse carriages. If those hadn’t existed already, it would have made much more sense to redesign the vehicles to actually work without a paved surface. Like the horse carriages and early cars, which had really large hard wheels and softer suspension. It really is the invention of asphalt roads that caused modern cars to be such whiny rubber glove bitches.
Perhaps the whole flying car science fiction isn’t that stupid after all, because it eliminates the need for roads and tires and all the shit that comes from it. Small electric personal planes already exist. Roll out the solid state batteries and autopilot and we’re almost good to go.
This is what billionaires ought to spend their money on instead of drilling holes in the desert.
Yes. In addition to the environmental costs there is the very real financial costs. Th cost of building and maintaining our roads is causing municipal debt to skyrocket across North America, which results in reduced services elsewhere, like cuts to community centres or schools. Theres a very good book on this topic called You’ll Pay For This which I recommend to anyone interested in city politics
Small electric personal planes already exist.
where? are they expensive?
asking for a friend.
There’s the Pipistrel Velis Electro. It costs about $200 000. It’s a regular plane. Been around for some years.
What I’d like to see is more of is stuff like the Ehang 216 eVTOL drones. I don’t know if they’re actually commercially available yet or what kind of places they’re allowed.
We can call them automotives, as they are automated and move us around.
This is lovely but I imagine to make this truly available for everyone everywhere you would need the tracks to look about the same as the fibre wires left by drones in Ukraine.
