Michelin plans wooden tyres

Wooden tyres could be ready for the road in less than two years. But they won’t be like the rolling logs used by cartoon characters Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble.

Instead, wood will become the major ingredient for a sustainable future as the tyre business looks to wean itself away from oil.

Michelin is driving the wooden wedge as it also works towards a future where 3D printing of rubber will allow cars to run on a single set of tyres for a lifetime.

“It’s not a dream. We should have the first industry machine in 2020. And then the industry will ramp up from there,” says Michelin’s Cyrille Roget, the worldwide director of scientific and innovation communication.

“We talk about moving on. We hope in 2020 we will be able to show the first tyre made of wood.”

Roget says the switch to wood has a range of benefits, from the reduced reliance on oil to lower production costs and local sourcing.

“Trees grow everywhere. So you re-distribute the opportunity for everyone to have local sourcing. And they are renewable,” he told carsales.com.au at the launch of Michelin’s latest Primacy 4 tyre in Thailand.

“We will still have rubber in tyres, which is also sustainable.”

The wooden tyres will still have most of the components used today, but with a big difference.

“The elastomers from wood chips will replace the oil content in tyres. 80 per cent of the materials in tyres are coming from oil.

“We have a project working with wood chips. We will use the waste from the wood industry to create elastomers that come into tyres.

“We believe it is a good solution for the future,” Roget said.

Michelin is doing some of its research on wood in Brazil, where it has established a sustainable plantation model that includes the growing of bananas and cacao alongside rubber so that people can be self-sufficient in all areas.

“That’s a project we are really working on. We are working to have more plantations,” Roget said.

Further into the future, Michelin says it is well advanced with its 3D printing plan.

The idea is that a car is created with a single set of wheels and tyres, which are then renewed when the rubber wears down in a similar way to the old process of re-capping worn tyre carcasses.

“We have established a joint venture with a company called AddUp that is the leader in 3D printing for metallic parts. It has already made more than one million parts, so it is not prototyping.

“We are working with it to develop rubber printing, or polymer printing. We are more in the early stages of this technology. But it needs to be industrialised and ready for the future.”

Roget says the realistic timeframe for 3D printing of tyres is 10-15 years, but that could change with new technology.

“We strongly believe that this is a solution that is well organised. It seems to be a good solution. Re-tread technology has been killed because Chinese imports were much cheaper than re-treading.

“The biggest hurdle for the moment is the network to be able to recharge the tyres. We believe the technology will develop very fast, so the question is how fast the network will grow,” Roget opined.

“We can print the tread, but it needs to be industrialised. We are making some very fast advances.

“It could be that eventually the re-charge station for your electric car is also the recharge station for the tyres,” he said.

Image: Cartoon Network, Hanna Barbera, Warner Bros Entertainment TM