In the late 80's/early 90's, one of the tire manufactures came out with a dual tire/wheel for production cars. It's touted benefits were many but improved hydroplaning resistance was one of the biggies. Unfortunatly, it was deemed cost prohibitive as well as requireing a redesign of tire mounting machines.

The grooves in tires actually act as pumps to move h20 away from under the tires and allow the rubber to meet the road. Hydroplaning occures when your tires can't pump out all the water they are encountering. Formula 1 cars regularly run well over 100 mph in the rain so I'd say the technology is definetly up to the task.

Of course, all the technology in the world won't help if you drive to fast in the rain on tires with excess tread wear.

:D

With street tires, the wider the tire, the more prone to hydroplaning it will be. I don't think air pressure would be an economical solution. It would require a lot of power to pump the air. I sort of like the squeegee idea. A squeegee touching the road would slow you down a lot, exactly what you should be doing in the rain anyway. If it was kept say, 1/8" above the ground (using dynamic radar), it might help on standing water that wasn't deep. It would probably cost a lot to make it work (it needs to be able to retract when not needed and not ruin the airflow dynamics).

I just wish that the military would release it's black box technology on anti-gravity so we could have our flying cars and road traction wouldn't be an issue. Of course that brings up myriad other questions (all of which I am sure are solvable).

I'm with Avery Brooks (in the IBM commercial): Where's my flying car?

Part of the problem is the adoption for reasons of fashion/roadholding or ride comfort of wider and wider tyres on modern cars. You can bet you that a Model T or a Citroen 2CV never aquaplaned. Also, the best car ever for dealing with moderate snow was the 2CV - narrow tyres and a chugging two cylinder engine over the driving wheels with minimal BHP and adequate torque.

Use tires that are narrow. Same is for snow. The more weight per square inch for a given vehicle net weight, the less you will hydroplane. An alternative is to have deep grooves between rows of thin rigid tread. The problem there is it gets noisy.

I saw this comment and thought..This requires an in depth and obvious lack knowlegde to produce such rubbish:-)

"reasons of fashion/roadholding or ride comfort of wider and wider tyres on modern cars. You can bet you that a Model T or a Citroen 2CV never aquaplaned. Also, the best car ever for dealing with moderate snow was the 2CV - narrow tyres and a chugging two cylinder engine over the driving wheels with minimal BHP and adequate torque."

First of of all: A 2CV will aquaplane on worn tyres. The 125x15 that are fitted runs with a very low pressure, and logical wide tyres run with low pressure..And secondly YES the 125x15 is a wide tyre when fitted to a car that weighs less than 550kgs or half that of a VW Golf.

Front wheels carries about 300kg, or 300 lbs each, when the car is unladen..Narrow tyres?? *blows a raspberry*

The engine and gearbox weighs around 200lbs, a third of what a "normnal" engine weighs, and still develops up to 32 hp or that of a VW 1300, though the VW is twice as big..

The big problem here is drivers. Most drivers don't understand what understeer or oversteer is from a technical perspetive, or how to rebalance the car so that weight is in the proper areas and settled. Especially in the rain. Many people mistake a simple traction loss for hydroplaning. Hydroplaning prevents you from making any steering/braking inputs, but so does understeer. Consumer cars are set up to understeer. Naturally, lots of very untrained and uninformed drivers make this mistake.

As has been stated, high performance wet tires will do exactly what you want. They're expensive, and you need to ask for them. They also don't last very long, because they're a performance part and are built to keep cars on the road, not survive. The treads on wet tires have deep grooves, to allow a large amount of water into the tread, and are a series of slots 45-60 degrees to the direction of travel - somewhat like a propeller and squeegee combined. It gets the water moving perpendicular to the direction of travel. As much water as possible is thrown out of the contact patch, to allow the tread grooves to deal with the rest.

Tire design is a series of trade-offs. There is no such thing as a true "all around" tire. Only tires that have moderate/poor abilities all around - dry, wet, snow, and long life. The longer the life of the tire, the poorer the handling charactaristics of that tire will be. Formula 1 doesn't go 180 mph in the rain and still expect to use the same set of tires next race.

Western Washington University (Vehicle Research Institute) addressed the problem of reducing rolling resistance while maintaining traction on one of its Viking cars by mounting two narrow tires on a single wide wheel. Wheel camber was controlled automatically: negative camber while traveling straight ahead, neutral camber while turning or braking. Check it out!

Can we run our car with water and gas? Can anybody tell me is the HHO Gas is real working or is another scam?

hi there, I use water to fuel a car as a supplement to gasoline. In fact, very little water is needed, only one quart of water provides over 1800 gallons of HHO gas which can literally last for months and significantly increase your car fuel efficiently, improve emissions quality, and save money. I found the way through this site http://www.runcarsonwater.us i really recommend it to everybody, it's a nice eBook where you can find the instructions on how to do it! take a look.

hi, euro tires have softer rubber (semperit)deseigned to run on wet cobblestone roads!they dont cavitate or hydro in deep water!

PS useing these tires i can corner in rain like the road is dry!