COOL NEW WHEELS CHANGE WORLDS
Now your wheels can be as beautiful as your principles.
The new Mercedes SLS AMG Coupé Electric Drive is super-fast, super-green, and super-gorgeous. It is the world’s fastest electrically-powered series production vehicle. It’s basically an eco-friendly work of art.
If you lust for thrust, zoom from zero to 100 km/h (62 mph) in 3.9 seconds. You can press it to 250 km/h (155 mph) if you’re in a hurry. Four compact permanent-magnet synchronous electric motors, each spinning at 13,000 rpm, crank out a combined maximum output of 552 kW, in all-wheel drive, to get you there. Each of those motors gets its energy from a liquid-cooled lithium-ion battery pack what weighs more that 1200 lbs.
After 250 km, you’ll need to rest and recharge, however. And, unfortunately, that takes about 20 hours, so they need to work on that.
But while you’re resting, you can gaze at its beautiful form. Even the paint job has an electric aesthetic -- like liquid blue wattage coating a sleek and sexy body. Gull wings make it extra fly.
Video: Courtesy of Mercedes Benz, Youtube
It’s a quiet ride, as all electric cars are, but, if you miss the sound of your SLS’s normal (gas-powered) 6.2-liter V-8, you can call up the sound through the car's audio system. Vroom. Vroom!
A folding tire could change your world. If you ride a bike, but its big wheels trip you up when you try to transport or store it, your life is about to change. The long-sought-after foldable bike tire has been beautifully design and produced by Vitamin Design.
While bicyclists have great reason to rejoice, the folding wheel has even greater impact for wheelchair riders. After announcing the folding bike wheel, Vitamin users, Vitamins Director Adrian Westaway started taking in a stream of emails from people who wanted their wheelchair wheels to fold so they could better fit them in small cars, in plane holds, and other tight spaces.
With support from the Royal College of Art, the Wingate Foundation and the James Dyson Foundation, Vitamin developed the Foldable Wheelchair Tire. A foldable tire has been attempted many times in the past, unsuccessfully. Vitamin’s team saw the main problem was in the inflatable tire versus the framework. Twisting an airfilled rubber chamber was fraught with issues. So Vitamin focused on creating a solid tire that could sustain a proper fold.
“Starting with the tire first, not the mechanism, was definitely the eureka moment on this project,” lead designer Duncan Fitzsimons told Mark Wilson, founder of Philanthroper.com, in his article for CoDesign.
From there, the team designed a pair of spokes that fold out like a Hoberman sphere, allowing its full shape to both fully form and collapse. A third, solid spoke serves as a lock to secure the wheel in the open position.
When folded, the wheels take up half their normal volume of space.
Vitamin’s Foldable Wheelchair Tire was one of 10 finalists in the Saatchi & Saatchi World Changing Ideas Award and won the Transport Category of Design of the Year 2013 at the Design Museum (considered as the Oscar for the design industry).
The design is patented and is currently being produced by US medical supplies manufacturer, Maddak, as the Morph Folding Wheel, available to buy from Morph Wheels.
Even if you’re not working on a folding wheel of your own, there’s a good innovation lesson here for us all: “Sometimes our own interests can vastly limit our scope, when there’s actually a much bigger population (and market) eager for your creativity’s attention,” counsels Wilson.
Try to fit a square wheel into a round mind and you might say “no way,” but not if you get Shark Wheels. It’s a crazy idea that is crazy beautiful. Shark Wheels are square wheels for skateboards. With Shark Wheels, you roll faster, with more control, and you get a better grip on reality -- especially if your reality is sand or gravel. The wheels are tilted in a third dimension so that the squares roll in a smooth line.
Here’s how they work so well:
Faster: only a thin contact patch touches the ground so less rolling resistance
Grippier: alternating pattern sine wave design provides triple lips for better lateral control
Groovier: better with bad weather and terrain as grooves channel water and soft material vs planing
Cooler: Customize with graphics and/or piezoelectric lights in the deep grooves in the FACE of the wheel.
You can see it all come alive in Shark Wheel’s 3D viewer. And watch it in action below.
Shark Wheel Skate from Michael Hui on Vimeo.
On July 8th, 2013 Shark Wheel more than successfully funded its first ever launch via Kickstarter. They raised almost eight times as much as they dreamed, almost $80,000 in just one month. These funds will be used to do all of the metal tooling for the 70mm Longboard wheel as well as 2 others (the 52mm trick wheels and the 64mm cruisers). Shark Wheel is also eyeing the Quad Skate as its next wheel muse.
Shark Wheel is a portfolio company of the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI).
Check out the rest of our posts on Wheels this week in Arts/Design, Food/Drink, Mind/Body, Place/Time, Nature/Science, and Soul Impact. And enter this week's photo competition. The theme: Beautiful Wheels (Deadline, August 11th, 2013).
