When Charles Pyott considered the possibility of on-the-fly adjustable camber, he looked at motorcycles, the human foot and cars like the Mercedes F400 Carving and the BMW Clever. What he came up with isn’t something you’ll find on any of them: the Dynamically Augmenting Wheel System, or DAWS.
Instead of making a wheel that adjusts its angle, Pyott created a wheel split into eight sections that can slide laterally on a special hub and bearing. That means the wheels can have an effective camber change without altering their angle relative to the car, and you keep the vehicle’s entire footprint in contact with the ground. Not mentioned, it could also be used to alter the car’s track.
Interesting concept… except for the forces put onto that ring which controls the angle of the wheel segments would be INSANE! What will it be made of, diamond?
I’d love to see a video of it actually installed on a car.
Wow… that is a really coll concept. I had an idea similar to this a year back but like most of my crazy tinfoil hat ideas, I just kept it to myself lol.
I thought it had more to do with maintaining a contact patch as body roll changes the angle between the car and the ground. This kind of shit’s right up newman’s alley. I on the other hand am not so great with statics. Waiting…
And has virtually zero effect on steering and little effect on grip… like real camber. That’s what made the Mercedes concept (in 2001?) that they reference so capable, it actually had dynamic camber.
I know wheel balance has a lot to do with side to side weight difference, but i see what is being said. As long as movement (weight transfer) is the same on each side of the wheel to counteract.
If a tire had a linear relationship between lateral grip and normal load, then loading tires equally wouldn’t matter, however, since grip vs normal is a logarithmic function, you want to minimize the delta of the load that each tire sees, ESPECIALLY in a side to side case, because tire widths are the same (unless you’re always turning one way). Increasing camber will ensure that the contact patch is maximized, but even dynamic camber won’t change the amount of normal load that the tire on the short side of the turning arc sees (decreasing as lateral load increases) to an appreciable degree.
The only way to really do that is by moving the center of gravity in a direction opposite the lateral loading vector (i.e. towards the centerpoint of the turning arc)
