Here's What it Looks Like Inside Your Tires as You Drive

It’s springtime! Time to start working on your project car, learn a new wrenching skill, discover what everything is under the hood (and how it works), or just spruce up your daily driver. All month, we’ll be looking back at our best informative, maintenance and DIY articles from Jalopnik’s near 20-year history to get your ride ready for the road.

It’s easy to forget that tires also work as shock absorbers. They’re an important part of the system, working alongside the rest of your car’s suspension to smooth out your ride, but you might not appreciate that because you rarely get to watch the work they do. Until you put a camera inside a tire.

The following video is the work of YouTubers Warped Perception and answers a question that probably a lot of us have had, maybe for our entire lives: Just what the hell does it look like inside your tires as you’re rolling down the road?

It looks both pretty trippy and also, in a strange way, somewhat predictable. It’s vaguely a little dirty in there, with small bits of debris flying about, but not in an unkempt way, more slightly dirty tire-shop vibes.

It’s also, surprisingly, a little violent, as somewhere around a quarter of the weight of the vehicle bears down on the thick rubber. I certainly didn’t expect to see the sidewall deforming as much as it does. For some reason, from inside the tire, the amount of deformation seems way more pronounced than I expected it to.

And when the car eventually picks up speed, the effect is even more jarring. This footage is pretty informative, and gives you a good look at what happens where the rubber literally meets the road.