Wired has a great story about the difficulty of engineering good tires for electric cars, a subject I’d never thought of.
Great-handling tires don’t last. Durable tires are loud. Quiet tires can’t handle. The rubber wrapped around the wheels on every new car is a carefully crafted compromise that favors some traits over others, because you can’t have it all.
Electric vehicles complicate things further, because they demand more of everything. They lack the roar of an engine to drown out the brain-numbing drone of rubber on asphalt, so quiet matters. Range is crucial, so the tires must play their part in pulling every mile from every watt. The torquey performance demands rubber stout enough to keep up.
Read the whole piece here; it’s worth it.
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