Man tests out how a single-spoke wheel concept would work in real life and physics teaches him a very fast lesson

A car rolling around on a wheel made out of a single-spoke concept sounds like something that shouldn’t happen, and physics confirmed that was very much the case.

But one man decided to find out what would happen if the unusual design was put through a real-world test.

The result was much quicker than anyone probably expected.

Because physics had a lot to say about it.

The single-spoke wheel looked promising

A viral Instagram video showed a car driving forward with what appeared to be a single-spoke wheel supporting the whole weight of a car.

For a moment, the unusual setup seemed to work, with the car moving along as the giant wheel rotated underneath it.

But things took a turn when the driver reversed.

As the wheel was loaded in the opposite direction, the single structural spoke couldn’t handle the forces being placed on it, the spoke snapped, and the entire wheel rapidly collapsed underneath the car.

Physics wasn’t impressed

The basic problem with a single-spoke wheel is that all of the forces normally distributed across multiple spokes have to travel through one point.

That’s a lot to ask from one spoke when it’s dealing with the weight of an entire vehicle, along with additional forces created during braking, acceleration and cornering.

With a conventional multi-spoke or split-spoke wheel, the load can be distributed across several structural elements, but a single spoke has nowhere near as much room to spread those forces out.

And making the spoke strong enough to cope with those loads would create another problem.

It would need to become extremely thick and heavy, potentially wiping out any performance advantage the design was supposed to provide in the first place.

It made for a very quick engineering lesson

The experiment is a pretty hilarious example of why car wheels have evolved around very specific structural designs.

There have been plenty of wild wheel concepts over the years, but making something look futuristic is one thing – making it survive contact with the road is another.

The single-spoke setup might look incredible in a concept rendering, but a real-world test demonstrated just how quickly things can go wrong when the forces involved aren’t properly distributed.

Instead, the driver got a very fast demonstration of physics.

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It might not have been the result the tester was hoping for, but it certainly proved one thing: sometimes a failed experiment doesn’t take that long to show you it’s not going to work.