It's the devil in the details or it's the relentless 'Pursuit of Perfection.' Whatever you want to call it, it's Lexus engineers with a severe case of obsessive compulsive disorder.
One critical factor of how we perceive luxury is how refined or how quiet the cabin is. For years, this meant stuffing the door panels, firewalls, and pretty much any interior orifice with a sound-deadening foam material. Unfortunately, this solution adds weight, compromising performance, braking distances, and overall handling poise.
Now, Lexus has found a new innovation to improve noise quality in the cabin while also lightening the total package -- engineers have designed a brand-new hollowed wheel design for the LS 460 flagship with the ability to quell road noise.
According to the engineers, road noise is formed when potholes or exposed roadbeds vibrate the tires at a violent frequency which then causes heat to expand within the rim. To better explain the technology behind the rims, Bill Camp of Lexus College explains, "Our hollow spoke wheel can actually reduce the frequency that's created when the tire hits an imperfection on the road. When air expands within the rim, it squeezes through a small channel [illustrated here with a red arrow] into one of four or five chambers, depending on whether the rim is 18 or 19 inches."
"Once there, its frequency diminishes and thus creates less noise... but the frequency doesn't shrink for free," explains Camp. "When it squeezes through it becomes heat, which then dissipates through a heat sink effect."
An intricate fan blade design with hollow spokes, the new wheels are lighter, quieter, and perhaps the most technologically advanced in the industry.
[Source: Popular Mechanics]
