DAWS, the Transformer Wheel That Splits

We have seen some crazy car concepts over the years, meant on delivering new, fresh and sometimes never-to-be-put-into-practice ideas to the table. Most of them, if not all, tried to showcase the future of the car as a hole, with the body, the engine and the wheels working together to create an until then unseen vehicle.

This way of looking at things changed, as manufacturers now also focus on developing new characteristics for every component that makes up the car, not as part of it, but as a separate entity. We've seen this in EDAG's Light Car (who's design is open-source, meaning the manufacturer made public all the vehicles specs for all to see and build on), we've seen it in Michelin's self propelling Active Wheel and now we witness this new trend on the DAWS.

Short for Dynamically Augmenting Wheel System, the DAWS is one of those ideas you might find unusable at first, but which might end up on the streets after all. DAWS' creator, Charles Pyott says he took inspiration from the a motorcycle wheel, as it has “decreased footprint size when compared to a car wheel and sacrifices traction hurting acceleration, braking and turning speed,” as the designer said.

The wheel works by splitting into eight different segments, guided by a magnetic guide rail on a liner bearing at the hub of the wheel. By doing so, the entire vehicle can be shifted without decreasing footprint size. In terms we all can understand, a car using this kind of wheels will never lose grip.

For example, a hard turn to the left will make the car's center of gravity shift to the side, causing the wheels to slightly lift and lose traction. DAWS cannot prevent the center of gravity from shifting, but allows all wheels to have maximum ground contact at all times during the turn.

We too got excited when we found out about it. Who wouldn't be? High speed turns, 100 percent traction, killer looking wheels...Then we thought about it. What about the tires? How do you make a piece of rubber filled with air or nitrogen split into eight, without losing any? You don't, at least for now.

Mr. Pyott doesn't seem to have solved the problem yet. The ½ scale model we see in the pictures (you guessed it, there is no full scale prototype of DAWS) shows rubber, but only flat strips of the thing. So, for now, DAWS offers 100 percent all round traction, but it will also allow any driver to feel every little road bump right up his...