Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/10/07/in-1963-goodyear-introduced-illuminated-tires.html
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11 Likes
Who cares about the tires, what car is that!?!
13 Likes
I was just coming to ask the same thing. Those tires look gaudy on that beautiful machine.
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Golden Sahara II - a George Barris custom. https://www.autoweek.com/news/auto-shows/a1717966/restored-golden-sahara-ii-debuts-geneva-how-and-why-american-custom-legend/
ETA: adding the II to the model name
12 Likes
Looks so much like something put out by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson.
6 Likes
Needs another set of wheels for that
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Thunderbirds are GO! Now it just needs a pink paint job to be Lady Penelope-happy.
5 Likes
Not enough illuminated tires at the time. 
5 Likes
Easy modern way: Fluorescent stripes painted on tyres; UV-LEDs mounted in wheelwells; see the burn.
Alas, wheels lack the necessary Ben-Hur hubcaps.
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Are you talking about spinning rims or the ones with the knives for chariot racing?
Knife-blades. For defensive purposes only, of course.
1 Like
Couldn’t find the clip of Speed Racer defending against a nogoodnik’s hubcap knives.
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The glowing tires reminds me of “Repo Man”
6 Likes
they need to normalize glowing tires immediately. to hell with flying cars – this is the future i’ve been wanting.
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The electrical side of this could never have shipped anyway. 1963 battery technology was nowhere close to good enough to run 12 incandescent bulbs inside a tire for any length of time. That means you need an electrical bearing contact rim in the hub, which will quickly corrode and become unreliable in the real world, exposed to the elements of the road. Furthermore, the tire has to be removed from the rim to replace the bulbs, which is difficult and expensive, so it wouldn’t happen, thus all such tires would be mostly patchy and burned out. The tires may also be impossible to balance because higher bulbs would not survive dynamic wheel balancers.
Modern technology could pull this off, in a form. With enough lithium batteries and LEDs, this might be practical in limited form, though there would be safety concerns about the batteries in the tire. It’s not too far from how modern tire pressure sensors work, though.
Sorry to poop on the party, but I have an aversion to implications that past futurisms might have happened if only people weren’t boring. Past futurisms fail because they aren’t practical or cost effective, same as it ever was. People often ask “why didn’t concept car X ever ship? It looked so cool! Real cars are so boring!”. Simple, because concept cars are impossible to manufacture for thousands of different reasons.
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Nah. Just use neon bulbs or a couple of nearly circular neon tubes. You wouldn’t really even have to wire them if you provided a high enough fluctuating electric field in their vicinity. 
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Hah! That’s not a half-bad idea. A big inverter in the trunk and coils in the fender liners… that might just work. 
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That car makes me want to go fight crime or something. Racing through the streets of some metropolis fighting shadowy organizations in a Wes Anderson superhero movie.
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You’ll be about as inconspicuous as James Bond in a Bentley or Aston-Martin.
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