Getting a grip in snow and ice is one thing drivers have been grappling with because the automotive was invented.
Ways to keep away from getting caught vary from winter tyres to snow socks, however few are fairly as wacky as a brand new growth from the Hyundai Motor Group, which the agency is patenting and hopes to deliver to mass manufacturing someday.
The new expertise remains to be in the hunt for a handy guide a rough title; for now it goes by the identify of Shape Memory Alloy Integrated Snow Chain Technology.
Imagine a sequence of J-shaped steel rods operating up the aspect of the wheel, then forming the criminal of the J excessive of the tyre and down so far as the wheel rim on the within of the wheel.
What you have got then is a set of six bars a number of millimetres in diameter throughout the tread, just like the paddles of an old style water wheel. That’s how the wheel and tyre would look when the hoops are within the prolonged place.
The tyres are designed to match, with corresponding deep grooves throughout them, into which the bars retract for driving in fairer climate.
The Shape Memory Alloy a part of the identify pertains to the bars’ extension into snow chain place and retraction again into regular use place, the place solely the rubber tread of the tyre is involved with the highway.
The secret lies on the tip of the lengthy part of every J form within the aspect of the wheel. It deforms when it receives {an electrical} sign on the press of a button, elevating the bar into the snow chain place.
When the button is pressed once more and a second sign is obtained, the reminiscence alloy recovers its earlier form and so the system retracts again into the groove beneath the floor of the tyre.
It’s simple to think about that making the operation of the system strong sufficient is likely to be tough, contemplating the beatings that tyres obtain. But given the fiddly nature of becoming snow chains, the brand new expertise could possibly be a blessing for drivers who dwell in locations the place such issues are an everyday necessity.
Driving in winter circumstances is one thing that many drivers most likely don’t take critically sufficient within the UK. In Germany, Sweden and different components of Europe, it’s a authorized requirement to suit winter tyres throughout the winter months, however not over right here.
The regulation relating to snow chains or studded tyres isn’t particular, but it surely’s fairly clear that any tyre-related defect or in any other case that causes injury to a highway is against the law.
Snow socks are okay to make use of, together with some other non-road-surface-damaging industrial system, however whether or not Hyundai’s new expertise will ever make it onto the highway is dependent upon whether or not it might chew up the Tarmac.
In principle, it could possibly be pushed on the freeway retracted and deployed when transitioning to off-highway surfaces.