It’s not every day you wake up and decide to strap 18 bottles of Coca Cola to your wheel instead of a tyre. Actually, it’s probably not any day that you wake up and decide Coke tyres are a good idea. But then, you probably aren’t the guy from Russian .
The wacky YouTubers decided to test the bizarre tyre hack and it wasn’t quite as disastrous as it sounds. The disaster actually came earlier, when the team initially thought frozen cans of Coke would work best. They will probably spend the rest of their days cleaning 18 exploded cans of Coke out of the freezer.
Plan B was room-temp plastic bottles of Coke. The guy featured in the video wrapped the bottles around an alloy wheel using large volumes of heavy-duty tape. Amazingly, he was able to replace the rear right wheel of his Mercedes with the Coke wheel which held the weight of his car.
Flat Coke
The first test drive went about as well as you’d expect, with bottles of Coke falling off everywhere, Coke exploding and a ‘flat tyre' the result.
Luckily, this failed attempt does not set back our fearless experimenter for long. He was soon pictured wrapping even more tape around a brand new Coke tyre.
Attempt number two was almost successful. The tyre held, he started the engine and rolled forward and even reversed with the Coke tyre still in place. The team show close-up footage of the Coke bottles rolling along merrily, just like a real tyre. Unfortunately, as soon as the driver tried to go faster than a roll, the Coke bottles flew off the wheel and the whole thing was a fizzer.
The Coke bottle tyre proved a real fizzer. Source: Garage 54
Reminding us why we never bothered to strap 18 bottles of Coke to our rear tyre in the first place.
Reminding us why we never bothered to strap 18 bottles of Coke to our rear tyre in the first place.
Russian inventions that worked
There’s no denying that this bizarre experiment worked just a little, though. You have to imagine that the entire test was conducted in the spirit of previous noteworthy mechanical and food inventions by Russians. For example, it was a Russian, army captain Dmitry Zagryazhsky, who originally came up with the caterpillar drive in 1837, the invention that led to the development of tractors and tanks.
Fellow Russian Igor Sikorsky invented the prototype of the helicopter in 1912. And it was Russian scientist Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov who technically invented yoghurt back in 1910.
Ironically, the biggest Russian invention was probably synthetic rubber, developed by chemist Sergei Lebedev in 1913. Man-made rubber is mostly used to make… tyres. Something the guy from Garage 54 is probably very grateful for considering his Coke tyres turned out to be such a bust.
for more unnecessary, but oddly fascinating, experiments with cars.
