What Happens When You Replace a Car Tire with 200 Lightning Cables?

Using Lightning Cables as a tire Credit: TechRax / YouTube
Text Size
- +

Toggle Dark Mode

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you tried to use 200 Lightning cables as a tire for your car? Yeah, neither have we, but it seems that somebody has not only asked themselves this question, but decided to find out the answer, and thanks to the magic of the internet, we can all share in the experience.

YouTuber TechRax is known for exploring such off-the-wall ideas as what it’s like to bathe in 1,500 gallons of Coca-Cola, what happens if you drop your iPhone in hot lava, and what happens if you fill up a propane tank with an iPhone XS inside. In his latest experiment, he’s now attempted to find a creative use for Apple’s Lightning cables that simply never would have occurred to most of us.

To conduct an experiment, he took about 200 standard, brand new Apple Lightning-to-USB cables and attached them to a car’s wheel rim in place of a standard tire.

Tires these days are very expensive, so sometimes we gotta go to different alternatives…

The challenge began with opening up all 200 boxes of Lightning cables, and then figuring out how to tie them all up in a way that would allow them to be interlocked and interconnected to surround the tire without them falling off or tearing apart. The chargers were first connected into six huge rolls combing both 1-meter and 2-meter cables, which were then tied around the wheel rim.

Once the wheel was completely and thickly wrapped in Apple’s iconic white Lightning cables — USB and Lightning ends included — it was placed on a vehicle for actual drive tests, starting with a slow 5 mph crawl, during which the cables held up, but at the same time started to come unspooled.

Subsequent faster tests, at 20 to 30 mph, still allowed the car to continue rolling, although by this point the charging cables were rapidly whipping off the sides of the wheel frame and tearing up into pieces, so that by the time all was said and done, there really wasn’t much left but a tangled mess on the wheel rim, plus a trail of battered, bruised, and broken Lightning cable fragments left behind. Still, it would probably get you home, although you might not be able to avoid a citation for littering the streets.

Of course, it’s also important to keep in mind that these are also just standard Apple Lightning cables, which really don’t have the best reputation for durability. There are undoubtedly better options available, and we’d be curious to see the exercise repeated with some of the more durable kevlar and ballistic nylon versions.

The video is entertaining to watch, but while the host declares this a “viable solution” in an emergency, we’re not entirely convinced that a run to the local Apple Store to purchase nearly $4,000 in Lightning cables is the most cost-effective or efficient solution if your tire blows out. Although if you do happen to have 200 Lightning cables lying around, a lot of time on your hands, and a bent toward masochism, at least now you know it can be done.

Sponsored
Social Sharing