All the studies I’ve read (and my experience) show that narrower tires and higher pressures improve economy. Less traction and less ride comfort are the tradeoffs, respectively.
Basically new data includes vibration losses which get larger as pressure increases. There’s a sweet spot to balance between rolling resistance (which decreases with pressure) and vibration (which increases with pressure). So when you mention ride comfort as a trade off, it actually has a much larger effect than you might imagine.
Suspension is great for smoothing out low frequency unevenness, but not so much for high frequencies, like something the size of gravel- a spring will ring like a bell.
Source?
All the studies I’ve read (and my experience) show that narrower tires and higher pressures improve economy. Less traction and less ride comfort are the tradeoffs, respectively.
GCN has a number of videos on this subject: https://youtu.be/jTZfrBVr5pQ?si=M5v6KP5ZZ9ZU5MXz
https://youtu.be/AK5KLvrzrb4?si=aMcYxYnWi9poZ8SA
And here is some technical data from SRAM: https://www.sram.com/globalassets/publicsites/cms-campaign-pages-not-story-pages/zipp/totalsystemeffeciency/pdf-downloads/tse-explained2.pdf
Basically new data includes vibration losses which get larger as pressure increases. There’s a sweet spot to balance between rolling resistance (which decreases with pressure) and vibration (which increases with pressure). So when you mention ride comfort as a trade off, it actually has a much larger effect than you might imagine.
Thanks for the videos and the PDF, but they are all bicycle related.
A car has a whole sophisticated subsystem dedicated for absorbing vibrations (the suspension), so I’m not sure the results can be applied there…
Oh I was only addressing this:
Fair enough
Suspension is great for smoothing out low frequency unevenness, but not so much for high frequencies, like something the size of gravel- a spring will ring like a bell.
That’s why a suspension is much more than a spring.