You may remember a post I wrote a little over a year ago now on a concept for omnidirectional tires for vehicles. You can find the old post with a video showing how they work here. In that particular video, the tires are shown to be used on a forklift truck, allowing it to manoever in ways never possible before with conventional tires.
Mitsubishi's concept rally car
This week, while Stumbling, I came across this page, which I was surprised to see, showed a concept vehicle designed by Mitsubishi unveiled at the LA Auto Show this year that incorporated omnidirectional tires! The original article was taken from Jalopnik and shows Mitsubishi’s vision of what they think will be a future rally car. I think that as omnidirectional tires are shown in more concepts, people will gain more of an interest and perhaps one day they may even become mainstream, built on normal domestic vehicles!
The MMR25
“The MMR25 incorporates an omnidirectional wheel design that consists of eight independently-controlled electric motors within each wheel hub. This makes the MMR25 the first and only “8 x 4” wheel drive vehicle. The rotational direction of the tires allows the vehicle to be driven forward while pointing the nose of the vehicle in any direction, instead of drifting you can actually drive sideways (or at any angle.) Innovative “Oblique Aerodynamics” gives the vehicle aero advantages when driving sideways.”
I think that this new, completely revolutionary (excuse the pun) technology is all very exciting will be offering amazing new possibilities in the world of automobiles.
