With underinflated tires eating up gas, where is the TWEEL?

Gas prices don’t seem to be going down anytime soon and ways to save are becoming the topic of discussion at the water cooler and blogs everywhere. When reading about hypermiling and other extreme methods, tire pressure always seems to make it in the mix. Tire pressure is consistently one of the most ignored maintenance routines driver’s pay attention to.

In fact, in a feature story over at MSNBC that you can read here, shows the implications and seriousness of ignoring tire pressure. The Rubber Manufacturers Association completed a major survey detailing just how bad driver’s ignore tire pressure. According to the survey, more driver’s wash their car, three out of four, than correctly check their tire pressure, one in five. Only 20 percent of driver’s on the road even know how to check their tire pressure correctly if they wanted to!

The chances of having low tire pressure is 33.3% or 1 in 3 cars on the road. This leads to over 30,000 injuries and nearly 700 fatalities every year. These statistics are provided by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). While accidents and injuries are the long lasting effects of low tire pressure, daily effects can be seen in your gas bill. The U.S. Department of Energy says that American’s waste 3.56 million gallons of gas or $14.2 million in gas a day at $4 a gallon due to tire pressure. For every penny increase in the gas price, an additional $35,600 is lost in low tire pressure gas loss in America.

If history continues to repeat itself as it often proves to do, drivers on the road are not going to become better educated or more diligent in checking and adjusting their tire pressure. An interesting innovation by the tire company Michelin, could possibly solve this problem for every driver on the road if fully implemented. It is said this new innovation for tires has been in development since 1995 and was slated to land on pavement in a mass roll-out by 2010.

Michelin’s innovative invention was the airless tire that combined the tire and wheel bringing about the name, TWEEL. TWEEL stems from the combination of the words (Tire/WhEEL) to make a catchy product name that is already being prototyped on all types of vehicles, wheelchairs, Segways and other small transportation units.

To understand what exactly the TWEEL is, Michelin explains it well on their website, “Michelin TWEEL is a single non-pneumatic solution instead of the traditional tire and wheel combination, made up of a rubber tread bonded to the hub by flexible spokes. The flexible spokes are fused with a deformable wheel that absorbs shocks and rebounds with unimaginable ease. Without the air needed in conventional tires, Michelin TWEEL still delivers pneumatic-like load-carrying capacity, ride comfort and resistance to road hazards.”

In 2006 Michelin won the Gold Medal for Innovation from The Intermat innovation commission in Paris. There were five criteria for Michelin to win the gold medal, they were: 1. Technical Design and technologies: improvement in productivity, ease of maintenance. 2. Economy: lower purchase price and maintenance costs 3. Quality of work carried out. 4. Ease of use, ergonomics, comfort, safety and improvement in working conditions. 5. Environmental friendliness. Meeting all these criteria with high marks the new innovative Michelin TWEEL easily took the gold medal award. TIME Magazine also selected Michelin’s new non-pneumatic innovation as “One of the Most amazing Inventions of 2005.” In addition the TWEEL was featured in Popular Science’s “Best of What’s New” honor in the Automotive Technology category.

With a sleek and well thought out technology like the TWEEL, it could not only revolutionize the transportation industry, but could be another weapon in consumers’ arsenal to save on their gas bill. Eliminating the need to monitor tire pressure while producing superior shock absorbing and road hazard invincibility, the TWEEL is set to make roads safer and more environmentally friendly. Other uses that are already beyond just testing can be found in heavy equipment and many military uses. If the time table stays in line with stated remarks from Michelin, these new integrated tire and wheel hybrids will be on cars and rolling down our roads by mid 2010. You can watch live demonstrations of the TWEEL and it’s various uses in this video presentation here.

Original here