Tires Coming From Wood?

[John]

Oil and derivatives compile a vast majority of the content in. Michelin tires. How about replacing some of all of the oil with wood from trees? Michelin is exploring doing exactly that, and says initial results are promising. Also coming are 3D printed tires, with potential “tread recharging” possibilities.

Michelin Wants to Replace Oil with Wood in Tires (By Sean Szymkowski)

Wooden tires don't have the best ring to them, but Michelin firmly believes they'll be a reality in 2020.

The French tire maker told Motoring in a report published this month of its plans to introduce wood into tires, and it's all about moving away from oil.

Cyrille Roget, Michelin's worldwide director of scientific and innovation communication, said the plan is to create more sustainable tires in the future, and experiments with wood waste have provided a solution. The tire maker will incorporate elastomers from wood chips to replace a tire's oil content. Today, 80 percent of materials found in tires come from oil. In the future, that percentage will drop to 20 percent by 2048, Michelin believes. And rubber will also be included, which Roget said is also sustainable.

"Trees grow everywhere. So you re-distribute the opportunity for everyone to have local sourcing. And they are renewable," Roget added.

Much further into the future, Michelin not only foresees tires made from wood, but also a single set of tires for a car's lifetime. The company believes one day that 3D printing will revolutionize the tire process. Where today drivers must physically change tires after the tread wears down, 3D printers could conceivably "recharge" tread. In layman terms, a 3D printer would print new tread when the tread eroded to an unsafe level. Roget even pictured a day when an electric car charging station also includes a 3D printer to "recharge" tire tread.

3D-printed tires are further down the line, perhaps 15 years at minimum, Roget said, but Michelin hopes to show its first tire made from wood in less than two years.

https://www.motorauthority.com/news/...-wood-in-tires

[LightningBolt]

John - somehow steppin on the gas and burning wood doesn't conjure the same image.

[John]

However, t would smell a hell of a lot better. I caan hear someone saying before peeling out, “want to smell our campfire?”

[Fasttoys]

Rather keep the trees

[Mobius]

However, t would smell a hell of a lot better. I caan hear someone saying before peeling out, “want to smell our campfire?”

Add some Hickory in my tires...

[Fireeagle]

Mesquite for the BBQ smell

[John]

All those sound and smell good, and perhaps a whiff of cedar too! We are lucky to life in the PNW, with thankfully billions of trees. We have over 10,000 on our own property — with 2,000 of those being those we planted over the past 30 years.

[Fireeagle]

Sounds like you have some nice property there in PNW. That's a great thing you've done with planting so many trees. I've done a number of evergreens and fruit trees, but keep cutting the evergreens back to try to get them to stop dropping needles on my C4.

[John]

I love the old Chinese proverb, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now."

The first ones we planted were when we bought our property, planting them around the edges of it was for selfish, privacy reasons. They are Douglas Fir trees, the earliest ones we planted are now over 60’ tall. We kept planting 100 more every January. Along the way, we also planted some Ponderosa Pines (now some are over 30’), and mostly lately, some Giant Sequoia’s (the tallest ones approaching 20’ tall).

Nice, secondary selfish benefit also, that we have reduced the acres of fields we periodically cut to reduce fire danger, from the 8 acres we started with, to now about 4. The other 8,000 trees that were on the property when we bought it include a few oak trees nature planted around the time of the Revolutionary War (so a botanist told us), some maples, and a few fruit trees (our parcel was partly a fruit tree farm in the 1960’s and early 1970’s), madrone trees and assorted others.

Nature has also provided us with several acres of blackberries. We are very lucky kids to live where we do — though at times lots of work to keep it safe and looking okay.

Oh yes, nature has also provided us too some poison oak (some approaching small tree size) — to keep us humble and alert.