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.