I understand that carbon is black so we end up with black tires. But black has max conductivity, so wouldn’t there be a possibility of overheating and bursting? Why don’t we have coat it with coloring agents so it’s with a color that’s thermally less conductive?
In: Physics
Rubber tires started out white because that was the color of natural rubber. But natural rubber is soft and they wore out quite quickly. Eventually a guy named **Charles Goodyear** invented vulcanized rubber, a way of treating rubber with sulfur and other chemicals to create cross-linked molecules that made the rubber much tougher. As you probably picked up by now he used this invention to make better tires.
Part of the ingredients in these better tires are 20-30% carbon, specifically a form of fine particulate carbon called “carbon black”. This makes the tires stronger, more conductive to heat helping to cool the treads (we *want* them conductive), and protects the tire from UV damage from sunlight. It also makes them emphatically black. If you want them another color you had better paint them because you can’t make them out of 30% carbon black and expect any other dye or pigment to show up while having anything left for, you know, **tire**.
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