Remember Ron Arad's spring steel wheel bicycle? Wisconsin-based Resilient Technologies, a company that develops "advanced mobility products," makes something similar for motor vehicles: The Non-Pneumatic Tire.
But while Arad's bike wheels are designed to turn heads, the NPT is designed to survive military conflicts; the U.S. Army Research Laboratory is current testing them out on Humvees, as "the NPT will not go flat if shot or hit by shrapnel from a roadside bomb."
While there's no public footage of the NPT under attack, here's what the wheel looks like in milder testing:
And here's what it looks like on a civilian vehicle:
(more...)