Conversely, this is why road bikes are horrible on soft surfaces. With narrow tires at 100+psi a bicycle has a higher contact pressure than any car or SUV and so sinks in sand.
That way, when going slow on the mud, you can go all the way down to 5 PSI for great traction. And on the highway you can go up to 40 PSI so you don't overheat the tyres or destroy the rims when you hit a stone.
It could auto inflate or deflate depending on speed, terrain, and tyre temperature. And obviously a manual override for those who want ultimate control.
Normal cars don't belong in the mud.
The design could be as simple as a $15 compressor bolted inside each wheel, powered by either the rotation of the wheels or a slipring arrangement.
Just having your tires inflated right at the start of your trip does that. TPMS systems will already tell you what your tire pressure is, and with so many cars ditching the spare and going with an inflator+tire goop kit the car already has an inflator you can use. As mentioned, the vast majority of cars aren't leaving the pavement, so as long as they keep their tires inflated properly its not an issue.
That little compressor inside the wheel is then adding unsprung weight, which is bad. You normally want to try and reduce that as much as possible for your suspension's sake. You'd then also need more complicated wheel assemblies. That area of the car also takes a lot of abuse with all kinds of nasty stuff kicked up in there, not exactly the place where you would want to keep an air compressor. You're also then putting this minature air compressor in the space that takes the most physical abuse in the car. You also then need a way more complicated hub design with gearing and clutches inside to properly drive the compressor when needed. This would be a way worse style of doing it compared to existing designs which just run air hoses to each hub with a central air compressor tucked away someplace safe and protected.
If I had a choice between a car that just had an inflator kit in the trunk versus one with four mini air compressors and tiny transmissions and clutches in the wheel hubs along with complicated non-normal wheels and was overall more expensive, I know exactly which car I'd take every time.
I'd put money on the vast majority of people ignoring tire inflation unless they get a warning.
They are not vehicles intended for living in a community, and it's a travesty that the government has not put regulation in place meant to protect those outside the vehicle.
(Jokes aside, most ICE trucks are not loud on the highway, unlike this one with a modified exhaust being demonstrated with wide open throttle.)
Tire noise in particular is affected by vehicle weight (I suspect--don't quote me--as a square of the weight). EVs are MUCH heavier that comparable ICE cars. The hummer EV weighs 9,000 lb (!). So they are extremely loud at highway speeds.
The H2 (the big 3-row one) weighs 6,400 lbs. The H3 (the 'small' 2-row version with seating for just under 5 adults) weighs 4,600 lbs. The HEV (ostensibly "Hummer Electric Vehicle", but obviously pronounced "Heavy") weighs 9,400 lbs and only seats 5.
All three are absurd tools to select for transporting a 160 lbs human between point A and point B.
I can understand engineering constraints that say a vehicle with an energy source and controls and comfort and so on requires some multiplier that might not be less than 1, but 58x is a lot.
Maybe its better than an F-250...
Maybe full sized SUV. But even a 5000lb Ranger Raptor is probably not a competitior.
As for handling:
The hummer EV has a 0 - 65mph time of 1.4 seconds...and a stopping distance from 70mph of 200 feet.
That means if a person were to step on the gas for a second and a half, and a pedestrian happened to be crossing the street 80 yards away, that person would be dead.
As for hummer level acceleration, I agree that’s unnecessary and would be dangerous to use in an urban area. 0-65 mph in 1.4 seconds sounds wrong though, it’s more like 4 seconds. Car and Driver measured 3.3 seconds for 0-60 excluding rollout time. Accelerating full blast in such a fast car in an urban area would be reckless on the driver’s part, but that doesn’t mean you can’t drive it safely and reasonably in urban areas.
The Hummer’s bad stopping distance is from a combination of heavy weight an off-road focused tires not optimized for dry pavement grip. With that said, its stopping distance is only around 15% worse than the average car.
As an example of stopping distances and cornering grip of a more typical pickup like my RAM 1500, on stock tires, it’s 187 ft from 70 mph, and cornering grip is 0.78 G. For comparison, a Toyota Corolla has a 174 ft stopping distance and 0.82 G grip on stock tires, so around 5% better but not drastically better than the RAM truck.
It might surprise you what can be done with a sedan.
Sometimes it's even don't go below 20% of the battery which takes away even more.
So driving down to 0% is fine, doing so and letting the car sit for a few days can be bad
The difference between a Tacoma and a Ram 1500 is inconsequential and nobody is cross shopping a dually truck and a minivan. Even among comparable vehicles the performance goals they had when programming it are going to dominate over weight differences.
Source: Grew up on a glorified sandbar full of jerks