How tires change with electric cars

Dusseldorf The car race from Paris to Bordeaux in 1895 went down in history. The brothers Andre and Edouard Michelin mastered the route – to the astonishment of their contemporaries – in their Peugeot with pneumatic tires. Previously, they were only used on bicycles; until then, the heavy cars always had solid rubber tires.

That was the beginning of the triumph of pneumatic tires. They enable higher speeds, better driving characteristics – and are cheaper to manufacture. After all, they’re made of a lot less rubber and gum.

Ironically, Michelin of all people is now reintroducing the tire without air. It caused quite a stir at this year’s IAA auto show. But why is Michelin now coming onto the market with a deflated tire? Perhaps the engineers of the French tire company remembered a statistic from the car race more than a century ago: The Michelin brothers had 50 punctures on the trip.