Goodyear Spherical Tire Concept

The latest crazy concept release from the Geneva Motor Show isn’t a car, it’s the Goodyear Eagle 360 Urban Spherical Tire. The medicine ball-sized tire is made with a 3D-printed bionic skin made of super-elastic polymer and is suspended from the car using magnetic fields. It also connects to infrastructure, other vehicles, traffic networks and the environment to gather information in real-time, which is then processed by the artificial intelligence in the tire to determine course of action. It can morph to add dimples for bad driving conditions. It can rotate for on-the-go self-healing purposes. It can even sense when it needs maintenance and tell the autonomous car to take it to a service center. Will they be able to attach to normal cars? Will they ever see production? Will they work? The answers to all those questions are probably “not in our lifetimes,” but we wouldn’t be surprised to see a fleet of vehicles on these tires in the next big science fiction blockbuster.