The tire of the future is a ball. An unbelievably sophisticated, nature-inspired, magnetic-levitation-infused ball. Goodyear just revealed its vision for a concept tire that's intended for the self-driving car of tomorrow. It's called Eagle-360, and it's totally round.

Why put a car on a quartet of glorified mouse trackballs? Goodyear says the 3D-printed tires will have a larger contact patch with the ground, allowing for more control. The design lets the tires hurl water away via centrifugal force. But the big reason is that spherical tires can be essentially omnidirectional.

Today you turn your tires to the right and make the car move in that direction. But—as you understand intuitively if you've ever tried to parallel park and failed miserably—today's cars don't go sideways relative to direction the car is pointed. You've got to go forward or backward to go right or left. Your Toyota's limited range of motion means you can't just pull up alongside an open parallel parking space and roll into it sideways, moving at a sweet 90 degrees to the way you're pointed.

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The appeal of spherical tires is pretty clear, then. Just watch Goodyear's amazing video and see the concept car with its concept ball tires pass a bus without changing the orientation of the car, or recover from a skid by moving the tires in four different directions at once to regain control. As The Inverse points out, car engineers have been dreaming for decades of being able to use this technology. The problem is, just how in the hell do you attach a sphere to a car without limiting that perfect range of motion?

The answer is, you don't. Goodyear Eagle-360 would use magnetic levitation (MagLev) to suspend the vehicle over the tires by magnetic field.

MagLev isn't the only reason Goodyear's bringing back the sphere tire dream, at least in a far-out concept. A car can do much more on these tires than it can on today's version, but doing so also demands an insane amount of control. When four wheels go in basically the same direction, a person can control them with a steering wheel. When they can go in any direction, you need a computer to manage that. Now that our cars are about to drive themselves, it's high time to see what's possible.

Source: Goodyear via Digg

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