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Comment by tokai | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.).

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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