[bkanber]

Funny -- I presented a paper at that very same conference! Mine was 2011-01-0755.

The money shot is here. Note that '5.5 kg/ton' refers to the rolling resistance of the tire.

> At this point the 5.5 kg/ton value is still only a design target, and this study serves mainly to confirm the environmental value of achieving that target.

Essentially, this conclusion is tautological. "If there were a tweel that had better rolling resistance than the best pneumatic tire on the market, then it will have a better fuel economy and environmental impact." Obviously!

I seriously doubt Michelin's tweel is anywhere close to that 5.5 kg/T mark. It's more likely something like 12 kg/T.

The purpose of this particular paper is not to show that tweels are better environmentally, it is to show an analytical framework for calculating the full-lifecycle environmental impact of tweels vs tires. Sort of like a "here are the equations, plug in real numbers later" kind of thing.

[kbenson]

Ah, nice to know, and thanks for giving a professional's assessment of what's being said. :)

[bkanber]

:) Not a problem! Your experience hangs a lantern on one of the problems in academia.

The authors of that paper did not intend to mislead -- this paper was published in 2011, likely written in 2010, only a handful of years after Michelin's unveiling of their gen 1 tweel design. To me, having been in the authors' position, I can easily tell what the true purpose of the paper actually was (the analytical procedure). But the authors had a secondary purpose driven by 'hype', almost, you could even call it click-bait: they wanted to make the tweel exciting so that other researchers would get interested in it and continue the work. One way to do that is by showing, from a materials perspective, that it is theoretically possible to design a tweel with a low rolling resistance, and given that, it's possible that tweels will be better for the environment over the full-lifecycle, including manufacturing and materials. And sure, this absolutely did/does deserve more research. However, the other issues with tweels, like NVH/comfort/etc, were 'out-of-scope' for that paper, and so they ignored those. Solving for those issues is what makes that 5.5 kg/T figure difficult/possibly impossible to attain.

When these papers are confined to academia, it all works out, because most of the people who read your paper are other people who are writing papers, and they get it. But once these types of papers are picked up by the press/media/general populous, they can be very quickly misinterpreted!

(To be clear, you didn't do anything wrong here, I'm just griping a bit about academia and pretending like I'm 'adding context' ;)

[kbenson]

Yeah, I'm totally aware of how hard it is to accurately assess and relate info from a technical paper without experience in the industry, which is why I try to make sure I express how little confidence I have in how I'm relating that info, given I very rarely have time to actually dive deep into a paper when looking something up like this.

In some ways what you describe is a very common larger problem. When you want to promote something (whether it be because of financial or more altruistic reasons), its hard (possibly impossible) to walk the fine line for all people between accurately relaying information and convincing people of something less factual (such as "this is cool and we should look into it more"), namely because different audiences' relative experience in the area will mean they won't recognize where that line is in many cases.

For example, at exactly what point does a website or description for some open source project move from purely descriptive explanations of what it can do to promotion about why it's cool and why you should try it? People with different experience in the domain it's in will have difference experiences ready that info. The neophyte and the layman will interpret the statements differently.