You Can’t Buy Airless Mountain Bike Tires—So I Made Them!

Video: Seth // Edit: Curtis // Words Below: Seth

This is a project I’ve been working on for over a month, though it first landed on my to-do list more than a year ago. Before I go any further, I want to apologize for the ad in the video. I try to remove these for Substack, but in this case it’s tightly integrated and difficult to cut without losing context.

In 2025, my editor, Curtis, showed me an Instagram Reel of an airless mountain bike tire. It was clearly vaporware, but he suggested I buy some real airless mountain bike tires and test them on video. I figured my options would be limited, and that perhaps a version existed with a solid core, much like roadgoing airless tires (which you can actually buy). Sure, you can search “airless mountain bike tires for sale,” but all you’ll find are 26-inch road tires. The closest thing I could find was a 16-inch foam kids’ tire. Nothing had knobs, and nothing was even close to a sufficient diameter for mountain biking. At that point, I began doing some research.

In 2012, a company called Britek was, indeed, working on an airless mountain bike tire called the ERW, or “Energy Return Wheel.” To date, this is the most credible, good-faith attempt at bringing an airless mountain bike tire to market that I could find. Highly produced promo videos from major tire companies and Kickstarters are quite common, but the ERW was the only product I found with genuine cell phone clips showing it in use. They were even doing demos at bike shops. The ERW was the real deal, but it never made it to market. Why? By that point I had a pretty good hypothesis, but I still wanted to try it.

I called my friend Brendan, whom you may know as “Outside Brendan” on Instagram. I told him I wanted to team up on making a real airless tire, and we kicked the idea back and forth for a few months. My idea was to make one that looked a bit like the sensational science-fiction versions, but Brendan, being, you know, an actual engineer, had something a little more practical in mind.