Magical, Retractable Tire Studs Only Deploy When You Need Them

Remember the scene in The Living Daylights where James Bond blasts across a frozen lake in his Aston Martin and presses a button to deploy metal spikes from his tires? That tech just got real. Well, realish.

Finnish tire company Nokian is showing off a set of tires that do exactly that, allowing drivers to deploy metal studs at the push of a button for on-demand grip in even the worst polar vortex. There’s a lot of snow and ice in Finland, so it’s easy to see how this technology would catch on there. Nokian has a few decades of experience with this stuff. It made the world’s first snow tire, and its tires were on an Audi RS6 that hit 208 mph on ice.

The tire is but a concept, and no matter how hard we pushed, Nokian wouldn’t say anything about how it works. “This is very unique technology what we use in that concept tire. We do not publish any details,” a company flak told us.