Automatically adjusted tires

It always fascinated me how there are two completely opposite types of movement on the ground: skating/sliding and wheels. The former requires no friction while the latter requires maximum friction. In the latter, tires are designed to have maximal friction with the road to get a better grip and reduce the sliding that may occur and cause loss of control over the car. However, tires are fixed while the road may change. There are different types of tires, if you know which road you're going to be driving on. I'm not talking about snow or ice, but rather on different types of roads like asphalt, dirt, concrete. The tires could be optimized for each one but not for all of them.

Nowadays there are materials that can change their shape and other mechanical properties very rapidly, usually through electrical current, such as shape memory alloys. I propose embedding these materials into tires and making them automatically adjustable to the road driven. One example on how to do that is to control the grooves on the tires, which lend them their grip. By lining these grooves with shape memory alloys, one can adjust their width and shape and thus change the mechanical and frictional properties of the tires. If you can thus switch between a tire that is good for asphalt to one that is good for dirt, automatically, then the grip on the road will remain optimal at all times.

A question rises on how to ascertain the type of road the car is on. One can either do it manually, by adding a dial on the dashboard to control which tire is now "on". Another way is to embed some sensor either on the tire, but probably preferable on the car, that detects the type of road and automatically adjusts the shape of the tires' grooves to the optimal one.

The last issue is the electricity required for the change. Usually, these materials require energy only upon changing from one state to the other, but even if not, the car has battery and the amount of electricity required is minimal, compared to other requirements in a car.

To conclude, one can not only optimize the materials and shape of the tire, but combining both one can enjoy all worlds of dynamically optimizing the tires' grooves' shape such that they will give the best grip and friction for the specific road traveled, thus increasing the driver and passengers' safety.