I used to watch a lot of airplane landings and take-off. My favourite moment is when airplane tyres touch the ground. Friction produces a lot of heat and hence, smoke.
But i wonder, why not pilot start rotating wheels before landing and match the speed of wheels such that it doesn’t cause any friction.
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Putting motors on the wheels would just be problematic. Unless the wheels were spinning at exactly the right speed. The sudden and inconsistent acceleration of the wheels hitting the ground would very likely overwhelm any motor and cause it to either stall, become damaged, or at the very least, act either as brakes, if the wheels are too slow, or if the wheels are too fast, thrust, which may destabilize the plane, if the motor was powerful enough (but more realistically it would stall the motor).
All these problems are way to complicated and expensive to deal with, when you could just replace tires every now and then and not have to maintain a far more expensive and complicated motor, which would be used for only one purpose, to reduce tire wear.
Note: this is all speculation; I don’t actually know anything about plane engineering.
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