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Comment by donquichotte | Hacker News Reader

As a guy who rode a motorcycle from Central Europe through Central Asia to Mongolia, the last part largely off-road, I wholeheartedly agree.

Simplicity is key. As a traveler, if your "wheel 4.0" has a software bug or breaks down in the middle of the desert, it is inconvenient enough.

I can only imagine the consequences this would have in a war scenario.

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It's also pretty annoying if your are stuck in the middle of the desert because you opted not to use wheel 4.0. In the end it's all about statistics. What is more likely to happen? A wheel 4.0 fail, or getting stuck with wheel 1.0 (where 4.0 would have helped)... The first likelyness is constantly decreasing with wheel 4.1, 4.2, 4.9 etc whereas the first one stays constant. At least at some point in time wheel 4.0 should be preferred.

In reliability engineering, the failure rate for a complex system is the sum of the individual failure rates of its components [1]. I will let you do the math.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_rate#Additivity

I somehow doubt that this system would perform so much better than e.g. removing air from a tyre or putting one of those metal boards under it that it would justify the increased complexity (and cost) over normal tires. I mean okay, you don't have to get out anymore, great. For deflating tires that isn't the case either anymore.

I'm interested in your motorcycle trip!

  -  How did you choose this route/destination out of the thousands of possibilities?
  -  Was there any specific goal beyond spending a bunch of time on a bike and seeing a big chunk of the world?
  -  Was your time almost entirely spend riding, or did you spend a lot of time in the places where you stopped?
  -  Camping? Hotels?  Staying at friends' houses?

Hi, if you're interested, I have a blog at [1]!

- more or less at random, it is IMO one of the more interesting routes you can start in Europe, opposed to e.g. the Panamericana or BAM.

- not really, I just wanted to explore the world (and still do, haha)

- Maybe 2/3 of the time was spent riding, the rest of the time I spent exploring places and waiting for visa.

- all three of them!

[1] https://goolge.io/motorcycletours/

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