ELI5; Why can Vehicle tires last Tens of thousands of miles, While Shoes get destroyed after a couple hundred miles, Even though tires carry a much heavier weight than shoes and go much faster
In: Engineering
Tires put weight over the whole wheel at a constant weight versus your foot is mostly on the ball and heel. Having probably 130-200lbs on 4 points while handling articulating joints is always going to put more strain on your base points.
The rate at which the rubber on the sole of your shoes wears is largely a result of how much you slide your feet or rotate. When people move they often don’t smoothly step down onto their heel, and even a little bit of heel slide will rapidly wear the heel of a shoe. In addition, people spin on their feet, and rotate, often with little of the sole’s area in contact with the ground. The rubber soles on my shoes last me a long time because I don’t drag my feet, and in most cases are still in pretty good shape while other parts of the shoe are breaking down.
It is a different rubber. Using tire rubber for your shoes would make them heavier, less flexible and more slippery in wet conditions. Tire rubber is made to work efficiently and withstand thousands of pounds. Your shoes need to support between 100 and 200 pounds, so a different rubber must be used to be efficient and work properly.
What are you doing that your shoes get ‘destroyed’ that quickly?
My usual shoes have done multiples of that and are on their final lap after a couple of years, and my walking boots are fine after a decade and probably thousands of miles of rocky paths and mud.
Shoes are built more cheaply. Consumers demand non marking soles that don’t leave black marks. Mostly shoes are made to wear out in a few years so they can sell more shoes. How else do you expect to keep the CEO in s current year yacht? Should be forced to shamefully cruise in last year’s boat? Oh the humanity.
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Make shoes from the same rubber compounds found in tires and they would be terrible at absorbing shocks but would last for years (the soles anyway). Make car tires from the same compounds as shoes and they wouldn’t last more than a couple hundred miles, if you’re lucky.
Different materials chosen specifically for their particular properties to meet specific requirements.
A funny thing happens with wheels, Imagine a wheel in motion, at bottom dead centre on the wheel where the rubber meets the road from the road’s perspective if we zoomed in a camera to the individual stitches of tread we would see that (unless the tire is skidding or under great acceleration) the tread is actually stationary from our road’s perspective.
This is all to say the tire’s contact with the road does not move relative to the road.
When we walk our feet slip, the act of separating your foot from the floor and putting it down again incurs a little slip, you may not even notice it but it does, your heel comes down the flat of your foot rolls kinda similar to the wheel then your foot departs exerting a lot of pressure on the ball of your foot that slips a little again and causes those two spots on your shoes to incur the most wear. And that’s not even taking into account all the times we pivot or slide on our feet.
A more apples to apples comparison of shoe to tire wear might be if I told you to press your hands against a wall, exert as much force as you possibly can while keeping your feet static to the floor…now how long do you have to press on the wall before your shoes wear out? The answer is a long time.
Vehicles are perfectly capable of killing a set of tires in a couple hundred miles just look at drift cars. The second the tire tread does start moving relative to the road you incur a lot of friction wear on the tire very quickly. And not just drift cars airplanes will only get about 500-1000 miles out of their tires, the act of touching down at 160mph and slamming on the brakes really has it in for them, and those tires are purpose built to do that job as many times as possible.
Now there are gonna be people out there saying it’s all about the rubber compounds of the tires vs the shoes and in some respects they’re correct, but even the most robust of work boot soles don’t live much past 4000miles. If it was just an issue of rubber compound someone would have just taken 6mm of tire rubber and added it to the bottom of a set of red wings to make a boot that lasts 25 times longer than anything in the current market. The real answer remains the differences in friction wear between walking and rolling.
My shoes cost 20$, I doubt the chap plastic will be able to sustain my sliding and scratching the asphalt for more than a year
Tires use a mucb harder rubber. Try pinching your tire vs your shoe. Your shoe will bend, your tire won’t.
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