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Schwalbe Teases 165g Aerothan Road Tire, Uphill eBike tires & Airmax TPMS!

Schwalbe Aerothan 165g road tire
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Schwalbe has certainly been busy lately. There’s new Tacky Chan DH tires, 70% recycled content commuter tires, plus an all-new logo and branding

As if that wasn’t enough, Schwalbe was showing a few additional concepts at Eurobike including the eye-popping Aerothan road tire concept. The eye-popping bit comes from the weight of the tires, since it otherwise looks like a normal Schwalbe road tire. That’s due to the fact that even though this tire replaces the rubber in the casing with their Aerothan nylon-coated TPU material, it still uses traditional rubber tread to maintain the traction you expect out of a high-performance tire.

Schwalbe Aerothan tire concept

By replacing the rubber in the casing with TPU, Schwalbe is able to claim a weight as low as 165g for a road tire. Perhaps more importantly than the weight, the tube-type-only Aerothan casing results in a super low rolling resistance, a more supple ride, and puncture protection on par with tubeless tires. If all that turns out to be true, all of a sudden you have a better option for riders who haven’t yet adopted tubeless road.

As an added bonus, the tire could also be 100% recyclable. We’re told that the Aerothan tire concept could be just a year out.

On the eMTB side, Schwalbe was showing what they call their eMTB Uphill Concept.

Schwalbe uphill eMTB tire concept

Obviously, the tires will still be designed to perform while riding downhill, but now more attention is given to the tread design for uphill riding. The thought is that since it’s an ebike, you don’t have to worry as much about ramped tread designs that decrease rolling resistance and make it easier to pedal.

Instead, you can design the leading edges of the tread blocks to provide better grip when climbing. The tread patterns will be directional with uphill and downhill-focused tread blocks for better traction all around.

Finally, Schwalbe was showing their new Airmax Tire Pressure Monitoring System. The Airmax valve mounts to any standard presta rim, and offers real-time tire pressure monitoring with the Schwalbe Airmax app. The app allows you to set an optimum value, so it will send you and alert if the tire pressure deviates. The valves can be connected to GPS computers from Garmin and Wahoo, so if you’re riding or racing, you can get a real-time alert that you might have a slow leak giving you time to get to the pit, or stop to find the hole and plug it before you lose all the air.

The app also guides you to their Pressure Prof tire pressure guide allowing you to dial in your ideal tire pressure settings. The app is availalble now, and the valves will be coming soon.

schwalbetires.com

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Andreas
Andreas
7 months ago

interesting to see what the lawyers at Nike think of the “Airmax” system =)

Grillis
Grillis
7 months ago
Reply to  Andreas

There usually has to be some level of possible confusion over the product/naming, but they’re in completely unrelated markets so that is not likely to happen.

Anonymous
Anonymous
7 months ago

The Schwalbe catalog used to say weights were +/- 8% of advertised.

I once bought a large batch of Schwalbe tires. They were, on average, +8% heavier than advertised, with nearly half of them greater than +8% heavier.

Schwalbe told me, no joke, that they could not be expected to hold the advertised tolerance range, that and there were tolerances for their tolerances. A weight of say 200 grams really meant something like 184-216g +/- 8%. They would “aim” for +/- 8%, and then there would be additional manufacturing tolerances on top of that.

Schwalbe “weights” are kind of a joke. They also seem to have stopped publishing this +/- 8% figure.

Robin
Robin
7 months ago
Reply to  Anonymous

What “+/-” means depends on how it’s calculated. “+/-” used to represent peak-to-valley tolerance will indeed include the max/min tolerance. However what’s usually used is a +/- standard deviation or a +/- RMS value of some sort, and that is a statistical value that isn’t bounded by the actual max/min values. All are equally valid, and I mean that from a science and engineering standpoint, not a marketing standpoint.

For reference, +/- 1 standard deviation means 68% of the values will likely fall in that range; +/- 2 standard deviations means that 95% of the values will likely fall within that range; +/- 3 standards will have 99% of the values likely fall in that range; and an +/- infinite standard deviations means all values will fall in that range. Even if the company is 6-sigma certified, that still means that not every measured value will be within 6 standard deviations of the design spec.

It’s no joke that most people don’t get such things.

Anonymous
Anonymous
7 months ago
Reply to  Robin

Are you serious?

If you give a +/- range, and it doesn’t fall in that range, it’s out of spec. Tail ends of the bell curve should be QC rejects if they’re not within spec. It’s not that they don’t happen, it’s that they don’t meet spec and should be considered faulty.

The bell curve wasn’t the reason Schwalbe gave. It was that they “aimed” for +/-8% and they wanted additional tolerances on top of that.

Let’s not forget the median for the batch was +8%. It wasn’t that 3 out of a thousand were out of spec. It was nearly half.

The spec they gave wasn’t that the standard deviation was 8%. It was that weights were +/- 8%. Standard deviations have nothing to do with this.

Last edited 7 months ago by Anonymous
Robin
Robin
7 months ago
Reply to  Anonymous

Yes, I’m serious.

The statement that weights were “+/-8%” as you claim is meaningless without the specification of how that was calculated and what type of tolerance it was. Maybe the person you talked to at Schwalbe had no clue what tolerances mean.

Was the mean tire weight 8% heavier than the spec, or was the median tire weight 8% heavier than the spec? If you’re gonna say they were equal, you can’t reject a standard deviation-based tolerance. Mean, median, and mode are equal in a normal distribution, but you already said that a Bell Curve had nothing to do with it.

Maybe the real problem is that Schwalbe doesn’t know how to do the proper statistical analysis. It’s hard to aim for a tolerance range if you can’t properly analyze how your measured values, in this case, weight, are distributed. If their excuse is that process variances are causing weight variances. Maybe they need to learn how to analyze covariances and variances of sample variances. It does seem like there’s something they don’t completely understand about their processes. That doesn’t breed a lot of customer confidence in the quality and consistency of the quality of Schwalbe tires.

Anonymous
Anonymous
7 months ago
Reply to  Robin

You have to be joking.

What a truly awful attempt at semantics.

If I’m an engineer and I specify +/- 1 micron on a drawing, that means the specification is +/- 1 micron. The machine shop can use whatever production method they want, with whatever standard deviation they want. If they use a more variable process it just means the rejection rate is higher.

Your attempt as statistics is also awful.

Even if we assume the weights are in a normal distribution, it just means that the Schwalbe reported average is statistically highly unlikely to be accurate. We’re not talking about the fact that bell curves have tails anything is possible, however unlikely. Statistical analysis would just show the MLV is different with a low likelihood of Schwalbe’s figure being accurate.

Fake Namerton
Fake Namerton
7 months ago

Schwalbe should work on making tires without lumpy beads instead of such gimmickry.

Fred
Fred
7 months ago

I really hope Schwalbe makes those EXR uphill ebike tyres! Their current ebike tyres are great. I love the Eddy Current front and am now trying their Johnny Watts tyre as a rear for the bikepark.

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