Tire sounds


This is the sound that your tires make as you're driving. Or rather, it's what that sound lookslike. Cars are damn noisy, but (with obvious exceptions) it's not usually because of the noise that the engine makes. Most of what you hear is the noise of tires on the road. and consequently, making cars quieter is more of a concern for tire manufacturers than car companies. Yokohama Rubber partnered with JAXA (the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) and its supercomputers to model the turbulent structures found around a tire rolling on a road surface, along with the acoustic waves that these structures generate.

The point of having an accurate simulation like this is that you can go in there and tweak a bunch of stuff in software, run the sim again, and see if your tweaks made anything quieter. You can do this with real tires, of course, but that takes forever and is expensive. Yokohama has used this sort of cleverness to design "fin tires" that reduce aerodynamic drag on a vehicle by controlling the air flow in the wheel well, making quieter and more fuel efficient tires. With enough simulation, we're looking forward to tires that are so quiet that electric cars will be able to run people over with absolutely no warning whatsoever.