Bike tire made from NASA’s shape-shifting metal are now available to buy | Hacker News Reader

Bike tire made from NASA’s shape-shifting metal are now available to buy

theverge.com

58 pointsrntn71 comments

Never going flat is not anything special anymore. Take schwalbe tires, their puncture proof tires will disintegrate of old age before they puncture. So if this metal tire is not giving a better ride than schwalbe marathon, there is no reason to use them.

edit: lets not discuss Schwalbe, its besides the point. There are many brands with good puncture free tires in many different styles. The point is that this metal tire does not provide anything current rubber tires cant do - both better and cheaper.

Schwalbes are absolutely excellent (I've used the, regrettably discontinued, Marathon Supreme on my commuter for years), but they're still subject to pinch flats if you're using tubes.

Schwalbe looks good for puncture-resistant pneumatic tires, but if you want true puncture-proof bicycle tires, I've been super happy with my Tannus airless tires. They're slightly heavier than pneumatic, but even on my road bike I don't really notice the difference, and the road feel is indistinguishable to me. The cost looks about the same as the Schwalbes.

Interesting.

The article implies the nitinol tires will last much longer, essentially a lifetime. Or at least most of it will, since they talk about $10 retreads. Presumably the sidewalls will never decay.

And I have no idea if this is true but it's at least possible that they'll weigh less than other puncture resistant tires since the usual method of gaining puncture resistance is adding a bunch more rubber or gel.

$10 retreads sound great.

Until the makers notice that people who'll buy $500 tyres will tolerate much higher prices for retreads.

They don't weigh significantly less than puncture resistant tires with folding beads. E.g., Continental Gatorskins in 32mm are 350g, vs 450g advertised for these.

I'm curious about the wear and tear, after all, even puncture resistant tires wear down, age, get UV exposure, heat up, freeze, etc. They hold up well enough though, and replacing them is cheap.

Are you aware of the mass amount of pollution of synthetic rubber tires and just don't care at all? Or unaware of the potential for metal tires (perhaps not this iteration but future ones) to improve on that?

If you care about a greener future or like the idea of a world that someday doesn't generate tons of plastic dust every single day through abrasion on concrete, then even if you decide the current product doesn't solve for your needs, this product and development along these lines is something to celebrate.

This iteration seems unlikely to qualify, as it still needs a replaceable tread. Maybe it's better some, maybe it's worse some, but it seems like it's definitely not down to 0.

Maybe this tech leads to good things in the future. Maybe. It's hard to imagine getting rid of the replaceable tread. For potential wins to have a noticeable impact, I don't think bicycles are a particularly important area to improve. For potential wins to have a real impact, I think any wins need to be upscaled to cars & trucks.

Right now, it's hard for me to imagine us putting pounds of titanium into each car wheel. Sure, yeah, maybe some other metal wheel tackles this problem. I just feel like we're stacking the tower of what-if's a bit too tall to build big expectations around this.

I truly wonder if they could go ahead with a nitinol only tire if the max speed was limited to like 10-12 mph or they advised against using it on certain types of pavement, in wet conditions, etc.

I am not worried so much about synthetic rubber tires on bicycles. The scale of the pollution from bike tires is microscopic in relation to car and truck tires.

The side of our roads are covered in pieces of damaged tires. My apartment near a freeway was always covered by a thin layer of the micro debris emitted by car tires. It's insane.

It's not the biggest lever we can pull, but it does feel better to know that if you were to replace your car with a bicycle, if we had no plastic tires we could almost feel like outside the fixed carbon emissions costs in the manufacturing of components, we'd be mostly pollution-free in our personal transportation (ignoring the implicit costs of the other products we use and their transportation).

The idea that I could take one additional bike ride and not have to know that it's going to create a marginal increase in plastic pollution is a beautiful one.

Unless we all have maglev bikes we would still be using something to create friction. Even these tires require a tread. I don’t see how this is a real improvement with regards to the sacrificial rubber.

Yah, but since this doesn't need to contain air(pressure), or hold a tube in place, it could be made out of some leather, fungus, whatnot?

To be clear, the metal in this tire is replacing the pneumatic interior of a traditional tire (air) -- not the rubber tread. It's still a rubber-treaded tire.

Also, no, there's really no reason to worry about pollution from bicycle tires. It's ~0% of rubber pollution.

Yeah this had me so confused.

I can somewhat go with punctures (some people just seem unlucky) but I'm trying to think hard and the amount of tubes I've had to replace in the last 10 years is... not a lot (and it's over several bikes, so I'd need several 500€ pairs of tires) and the amount of tires is basically.. I think I replaced one, after 10 years.

Then again maybe they're talking about people who actually ride a lot more than I do.

And tubeless tires with a good sealant allow you to have all the benefits of flexible tires (rolling efficiency and light weight) without any of this fancy mumbo-jumbo. I've been running tubeless tires within racing casings for years on the mean streets of Seattle and I have never had a puncture stop a ride. In theory a really big puncture could take out my tire, but most of the problems are due to small things (glass, wire etc.).

I haven't used this specific brand, but puncture "proof" tires aren't exactly that. Don't get me wrong, they are a huge improvement over previous generations of tire tech, but they still get flats if you ride a lot. Unless this has changed drastically in the last 2-3 years, which is certainly possible.

That remains to be seen. I've driven Marathons for a while, because they were the only readily accessible for my old-fashioned rims. At up to 8 bar, and they still felt like they had too much rolling resistance. Not so with Continental. AIUI this is a wire mesh, with replacable rubber surface. How that will 'feel' regarding rolling is open. Also I had less punctures in the 80ies and 90ies with the old-fashioned stuff which was common then, while bicycling much more and more aggressively, than the little bits I'm doing now. (In comparison, it's still much)

Geeze that's $200 more than I paid for my entire bike. I ride through the very shitty streets of New Orleans on a regular basis without any worry about punctures thanks to spending a whole $30 on a pack of Mr. Tuffy tire liners. I expect Falkor to be stolen long before this would be worth putting on him - and really, flashy tires would probably make him a more inviting theft target.

I'd check them out if they start making enough for them to drop to like maybe a hundred.

A lot of urban commuters are effectively replacing their car with a bike. Viewed through that lens, you can justify spending practically any amount of money on your “vehicle”.

I guess you could, if you wanted to spend a ludicrous amount of money for it, or incur a ludicrous amount of debt. I've spent my whole adult life using a bike and/or public transit to get around cities and find this to be an absolutely absurd idea.

Nitinol is not "NASA's metal". It was developed at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, which is where the last three letters of nitinol come from.

Dang it, you beat me to it. Nitinol is also not "bizarre" -- it's well understood and very common.

There's even this in the article: "Here’s a Verge video that provides a deeper dive into nitinol and its NASA origins"

Bizarre does not mean not understood nor uncommon; it means strange/unusual. When it comes to the behavior of a metal material, this is unusual.

Between stuff like this and the prototype NBA basketball, seems like fabrication techniques are getting us slowly to the point that inflatable-anything of all sorts will be things of the past, no?

It's headed that way, I recently bought a "self inflating" air mattress for camping and I love it. Basically memory-foam, still has air pockets but no pump needed.

Nice, avoids the dreaded four day hike with a popped camping pad.

"Self inflating" means that the mattress will expand (and draw in air) without a pump or use of your lungs.

Lie on it with a puncture, however, and it will still go flat. Containing the air is still required to provide support.

So not like the space tire. Noted.

Self inflating mattresses are over 20 year old tech.

Not only that, but in my experience they usually kinda suck. They are super thin, and with age they start to take quite a while to inflate. For the tiny amount of air in the pad, you could fill it with your lungs in a few breaths at most. I've been happier with non-foam inflatables that roll up much more compactly, and blow up to be two or three times thicker.

My experience is similar to yours. I had to start blowing air or sucking air out of the “self inflating” port to sleep or pack the mattress/pillow.

Ok, now I'm sad! I hope the one I bought recently is a bit better than the old ones you guys tried, we'll see. I've only used it a handful of times so far.

Therm-a-rest stood my test. How often did you use it, or rather, how did you store it? I've put mine to the side of the some wall, inflated, not rolled up. Used heavily every few weeks or months for a few days from about 2008 to 2014, after that only about two times a year for a few days. Can't complain.

"Now available to pre-order" is more like it. It's a Kickstarter.

"Now available to gamble on" could make sense to given the track record of massive, innovative tech kickstarters run by small startups.

What prevents this from being used on vehicle tires? Can it be scaled to trucks? It seems like a game changing technology,but why is focused on niche expensive bikes and not general "wheel tires"?

Motor vehicle tires are already very durable.

Hm, I've never got a strong recommendation to replace bike tires after X years, unless you're going very fast on a road bike the failure penalty is not very harsh, bike tires don't just explode.

I suppose they are durable if you count "they can take many kilometers and some people who do 50k a year..." and so on but my experience is more like "better replace them because they are old, and you only did 5-10k per year".

Their website[1] says they're going with bike tires to get product into people's hands faster. I'd imagine that vehicle tires are on the horizon.

[1]https://www.smarttirecompany.com/faqs

Vehicles are considerably heavier it might be that these tires aren’t suitable for those weights and in any case tires are regulated so there will be quite a bit of testing and certifications needed to be done to ensure that these tires can be used safely as well as not have adverse impact on the roads themselves.

This is one of those things where I'm super scptical that it'll perform well and it's very expensive but I'm almost ready to back it, just to see what it's like. Traditional bike tires are expensive and a pain in the ass, especially if you're a year round commuter on unswept bike lanes.

I commute & ride a LOT in the heart of a major city, and suffered numerous flat tires until switching to gatorskins. You may already be using cut/puncture proof tires, but if not, try 'em out. These things are tough!

Yeah, those are nice, I had them on my road bike. On my current touring bike I use Schwalbe Marathon, also not bad. I don't know if they make Gatorskin in wider versions.

If you think traditional tires are expensive, these guys are $500/tire.

But should the price come down over time?

I doubt these things will stay on the market long enough for the price to drop. It's too much of a compromise for too little benefit relative to existing pneumatic tires.

Link to actual product details: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/smarttirecompany/space-...

If you want to know how you can make a real practical difference in fighting pollution, supporting this company is a great way, as the standard "rubber" tire is a big source of plastic, forever pollution: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/tires...

I've followed these developments, the really sad part about this is nitinol shape memory tires were at first hoped to be a possible way to entirely avoid the disintegration of synthetic rubber from friction on pavement into microplastic/micropollution. Tires are responsible for an incredible amount of pollution even if you convert a car to an EV, that and brake pads. The NASA rover wheels that used nitinol for tires for example had no rubber at all.

Unfortunately this company found that nitinol wasn't enough by itself to give good tire properties, for one I think there were issues with traction. So they ultimately have just gone ahead and added the same tread material to the nitinol where the 'rubber meets the road', but at the least we can be happy these tires require 50% less rubber than normal ones. It also seems if they can get their re-tread program off the ground it will offer a reduction in the rubber that ends up in landfills: "In addition, METL tires use far less rubber than conventional tires, and the company is experimenting with different lower-emission rubber compounds".

If you care about pollution, we should all still support this company and purchase these tires if we hope to encourage them to perhaps have the budget for further r&d, it is a little sad though that there's no offering that's truly nitinol only for those who would be willing to sacrifice on other material properties.

Liquid metal [x]

AI [x]

'autonomous weapons' [x]

It's happening lads...

I remember reading about Nitinol in Coevolution Quarterly back in the 1970s (the quarterly magazine from the Whole Earth Catalog). I've been a little sad to almost never come across any uses for it after all that time, and this idea doesn't make me feel much better.

The one thing I have heard about it's use in: some very sophisticated medical stent-like technology where the shape during insertion is totally different from the shape in use.

I used to have some glasses (spectacle) frames made out of the stuff when I was a teenager and I loved them: they wouldn't get broken when my dog would bash me in the face and I would use them like a fidget spinner, folding them in half at the nose piece.

The nose piece would get warm when it bent and I found that, if I conducted the heat away with my fingers, it would then get cold when I released them -- bit like what a fridge does with its pressurised liquid.

I've never seen glasses made out of them since.

I assumed Flexon glasses frames are made from some form of Nitinol? They just say "memory titanium" in their marketing, which is pretty much what Nitinol is. My dad had several frames of these, they behaved in that same heating/cooling way you mentioned.

https://www.flexon.com/

I thought flexon was just very springy metal, not nitinol. Nitinol is not very rigid, it bends easily. And even though it snaps back when heated, it's not perfect -- I've got a few toys made of the stuff and after a while they get damaged and don't return perfectly to the original shape.

Searching "Flexon" on Wikipedia redirects to Nitinol.

This article claims its the same stuff, just a specific alloy:

https://www.pressrelease.com/news/myeyewear2go-com-eyeglass-...

The Beta Group, who claims to have started Flexon, says "Beta advanced the technology of Nitinol with its pioneering Flexon Ophthalmic Eyewear."

https://www.betagroupllc.com/wrought-nitinol/

Sounds pretty legit to me unless I see something else saying otherwise. I think they just stress the titanium of it as a lot of consumers probably think of titanium as a "space age" futuristic metal that they make space ships and the SR-71 and Lt. Dan's legs out of. Saying its made of Nitinol means nothing to a lot of average consumers.

All over google... https://www.google.com/search?q=Nitinol+eyeglass+frames

My son was born with a very minor heart defect where there’s a small hole between two chambers of the heart.

Instead of open-heart surgery, they did a procedure where they accessed his heart with a catheter via an artery in his leg. The plug they placed is made of nitinol, which meant it could be compressed very tightly for insertion and then returned to its original shape when exposed to body heat. Scar tissue grows around the plug and holds it in place.

I thought the tech was super cool, and we of course were very thankful that he could be in and out of the hospital in a day. Was even up and eating cake for lunch within an hour of leaving the operating room.

Less sophisticated is a penile implant for men who can't get it up. The device has two shapes it is stable in. Down, and up when ready to get it on.

One promise of nitinol mesh tires on extraterrestrial rovers is that damage could in theory be remotely fixed via resistance heating. Does this product leverage the shape memory properties of nitinol in any way? If someone permanently deforms the inner wires, can they use heat to fix the damage without melting the outer rubber? If not, all the talk about shape-shifting seems to just be buzz words.

Giving money to Kickstarter on high profile projects is like flushing your money down the toilet. I'm never going to ever back a kickstarter again.

Kickstarter really did themselves a disservice by not clamping down on the borderling fraudulent kickstarters that disappointed the backers. They should have split it up into phases where money gets released when certain milestones are reached.

Yeah, "Now available to buy" is not what "on Kickstarter" means by any stretch.

Veritasium's excellent video on it if you haven't watched it yet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSNtifE0Z2Q

>weighing 450g

Isn't that on the heavy side for a tire?

Yes. This is not marketed at anyone vaguely performance sensitive. For very rough comparison, a GP5000 in 28mm is 280g. But a more comparable tough, heavy (wire-bead) Schwalbe Marathon in 28mm is 560g. (Schwalbe could save a bunch of weight using folding beads, but it seems like they don't bother for the Marathon line.)

For the quoted 700x35 size, it's similar to ordinary tires. Depending on the type of tire you're comparing to (pure road tire, gravel tire, commuter, etc)

It's a little heavy for a 700x35 tire. Compare: Rene Herse Bon Jon Pass (700x35) @ 355g or Continental Terra Speed TR 35 (a knobby gravel tire) @ 360g or Continental Grand Prix 5000 All Season TR 35 @ 425g.

how would that last on (bad) roads? thorns, screws, potholes-with-grinded-edges, and plain rubble where the asphalt has disappeared?

(just "unswept" is the luxury level here. All roads are worse than "unswept". Sometimes they are roads only on map.. )

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSNtifE0Z2Q

There is no air, so they won't go flat.

amazing. schwalbe durano/lugano last on me on average 1.5-2 years (about 1000-2500km, depends on "road" badnesses).. that's $15x2 .. so these are like 15x times the price.. but still, the no-surprises-in-middle-of-nowhere may be well worth it..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com