As awesome as electric vehicles are—and, they areawesome—range remains their limiting factor. Regenerative braking, which captures energy otherwise lost as heat and returns it to the battery, helps here. And engineers have considered other ways of capturing energy from things like the rebound and compression of shock absorbers. Goodyear sees an opportunity to squeeze a little juice out of the tires.
Goodyear, like all tire companies, has spent a lot of time and money developing tires with lower rolling resistance, which helps increase the fuel economy of conventional cars and the range of electric vehicles. Those efforts led Goodyear engineers to wonder if they couldn’t make the tires generate electricity.
via Wired
Image: Goodyear concept tire (Goodyear)
