Saw this on /o/

>>1202474

That reminds me of someone who claimed they lost a front wheel but managed to drive across town to get home.

>>1202474
Not much. The car would still eight the same so the amount of weight going to the other three ties would be the same. You'd also have to worry about the pressure in your tires. Normal tire pressure expects 4 tires on the road. If you only have three then they might end up 'underinflated' for the weight they are supporting and that can increase rolling resistance even further.

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>>1202474
<-wheel, middle, balanced = wurks
your pic, wheel off-centre, weight unbalanced = vehicle weight rests on 4 wheels anyway, negating remainder of 'advantages'
>>1202482
you can drive a fair distance on a flat, modern run-flat on a decent car, you wont even notice. Different to losing a wheel entirely tho.

>>1202474
Sounds like a fantastic way to put a humongous amount of torsion through the chassis!
Rolling resistance is all well and good blabbering on about wheelbarrows and pine derby cars however the wheels are what pull a car along the road and allow it to brake! If you reduce the area of wheel contact and therefore friction the wheels will slip! Ability to accelerate quickly will be reduced, you will spin the wheels more easily than a normal car and very importantly the stopping distance will be increased massively. Good bye stopping safely!
If you are going for retarded ideas why not make all the tyres adjustable, say you could widen the hub to pull and stretch the tyre wider or squeeze the hub real thin to make the tyre thin on demand. That might work.

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>>1202474
>Hispanic jumping system

>>1202474

Pants-on-head retarded.

The rolling resistance of a car is already fairly negligible, as evidenced by the fact that even an unfit human such as myself can push a 3-ton (or more) car around at a slow walking pace. If you eliminated that resistance entirely, it wouldn't have much effect, and you're cutting it by LESS than 25% (only 3/4 of the wheels roll now, but that means they now each carry 4/3 of their original load, increasing their individual rolling resistance slightly).

And the amount of energy stored in the angular momentum of the wheels is, again, trivial compared to that of the rest of the car. Once again, replacing all of them with magical, zero-mass wheels would still have minimal effect on fuel economy. Never mind just one of them.

Tl:dr; Fuel savings would be so slight as to be undetectable (in fact, I would expect it to get WORSE thanks to having to run and carry the weight of the hydraulic system), in exchange for awful handling, uneven tire wear, additional expense, and more parts to fail.

The only thing dumber is that I bothered to deconstruct an idea this stupid.

>>1202474
It would make much more sense to build a vehicle with one wheel in the front, one wheel in the back, and one left and right. So you can lift the two in the middle (l+r) during long, straight highways.

>>1202474

Driving on only three wheels increases the normal force on each wheel, which increases rolling resistance.

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>>1202474

Why not. Semi drivers do this all the time.

This is pretty dumb. Handling would be atrocious. Passing semis, or any wind resistance would cause the car to pitch and steer unpredictably. Lifting one wheel will just transfer the weight (and therefore the friction drag) to one tire instead of two, which will probably overload it, consuming *more* fuel than four wheels would.

In city driving, the most energy is lost stopping and starting which is why hybrids shine in city driving. Regenerative braking, engines that shut down at stoplights, and gearing to target more efficient engine speeds during acceleration are where that energy is saved or recovered. Additionally, only about 25% of the load on the engine during highway travel is from the running gear and friction from the tires. The vast majority of fuel is spent fighting air resistance, so the best fuel mileage is realized by minimizing drag.

Check out aerocivic.com

Also: for three-wheeled driving, reverse-trike is by far the most stable arrangement. A small frontal area is much less important than a sweeping rear end to counteract the low-pressure zone behind the vehicle that contributes to the majority of the aerodynamic drag. That's why the most aerodynamic shapes are closer to a teardrop.

>>1202685
>>1202490
>>1202474
That makes sense for pinewood derby because they have shitty shitty bearings, and are super light, so they don't overload the bushing tolerance when you switch to 3 instead of 4.
Correction:
"Wheel Bearings: Washers, bushing, or bearings of any kind ARE NOT ALLOWED"
Yeah, it's just a wood axle on wood hole bushing, no bearings at all.

Also, the resistance of the axle is important when talking about gravity driven motion, but it quickly drops in importance when you add a motor. At the speed cars go, something like dimpling the body to reduce air resistance would have a much bigger effect than your plan, even if it would actually work.