It's slightly perverse that in an age of on-board diagnostics, advanced powertrains, an EV winning Car of the Year and autonomous vehicles, that we still have to stick a penny in the tread of our tire to figure out if it's time to visit the Goodyear store. It seems like everything else are getting high-tech upgrades, but for the foreseeable future we'll continue to roll around on grooved rubber. So any innovation beyond tread design and newfangled compounds is a welcome addition to the tire world, and this particular idea is so simple you'll be enraged that you didn't think of it first.

Red Dot concept design award winners Gao Fenglin and Zhou Buyi have created the Discolor Tyre, and here’s how it works: Underneath the black surface of the tire is colored rubber. When the treads are worn to a certain depth, bright orange shows through to tell you its time to buy new set. The coloring can also help you spot a tiny, insidious tear or leaks, and the designers estimate their tire will get over 12,000 miles before the subdermal color begins to show through.

But don’t throw away your pennies yet – there have been patented visual wear indicators for tires before, but they've yet to show up at the local tire shop. Too bad these kind of wares need to go through extensive testing and federal approval, because this is a Kickstarter we'd totally get behind.