If you don’t want your tires to blow up from too much thermal energy, then why a…

If you don’t want your tires to blow up from too much thermal energy, then why aren’t tires white (to absorb less sunlight and thus receive less thermal energy)?

That’s an interesting question. It’s probably difficult to manufacture white tires and they’d probably look terrible after they’d been driven a while. The old white-wall tires where difficult to keep clean. Because the pressure in a tire varies with its temperature, your tires will probably go over their optimum pressure on a hot sunny day. But driving them on the road also heats them, probably more than sunlight does. Because their temperatures increase during hard use, the tires are evidently capable of handling pressures much higher than their normal fill pressures.

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