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Comment by rngname22 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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