Coil Springs Tires on G-Class Mercedes: One Russian Way of Going Places (Not College)

There are certain undeniable advantages to using rubber as the material of choice for tires—it’s soft, elastic, long-lasting, inflatable, affordable, versatile, and the list could go on. This is precisely why it should be contested by the Garage 54 boys, the Siberians from Novosibirsk, who constantly push the boundaries of all things automotive.

Their latest antic revolves around the contact between the car and the road – the humble tire. According to their traditional ‘Mainstream is for the masses’ attitude, they devised, built, and tested a tire made of steel. That’s not the first time in the history of Homo Sapiens that such an enterprise was developed. After all, animal-drawn carts, wagons, and carriages have used a metal band around the wheel for centuries, and no one batted an eyelid.

However, not many brilliant minds considered welding suspension coil springs around four steel wheels and mounting them on a Mercedes G-Wagen. Thank the Gods of Piston for the Russians from Garage 54; now we have such an invention. Sometimes, good ideas take years, decades, or even centuries before they’re acknowledged, appraised, and applied in day-to-day life.

This isn’t one of those situations, however. The mechanical do-it-yourselves from Siberia have welded eight springs on a wheel (sixteen in total) to make one complete tire. Reinforced with a metal band on the outside, the tires should provide enough grip on soft terrains to at least be worth the effort, if not to make it to the next development phase (if ever there was one, to begin with). The principle is the same one that allows steel studs in rubber tires to bite deep and hard and keep the wheels on track.

That was the theoretical method before the damn things touched the ground because, as it turns out (pun intended), the spring-loaded tires are about as useful as a handful of tacks for a sore throat. Due to their inherent structure, the pitch of the springs is the perfect debris scoop. Pretty fast, the tire is clogged with dirty snow (yes, the Siberian winter is still wintering, albeit only just).

The outside-the-box thinkers from Garage 54 haven’t considered the possibility of driving their boxy Mercedes on pavement or even hard terrain, but it makes no difference. The spring tires are useless beyond all geographical hypotheses and intents and purposes. If they’re worthless when the going is soft, what’s to become of them when it gets tough? Well, the tough get going back to the drawing board. Stay tuned, Garage 54 have another one in the chamber.