What are you talking about? A solid wheel would perform horribly off road or on road in a gas or electric vehicle. You need some sort of tread and deformation to get any grip off road. And rubber is used because it deforms to the road and gives you a larger contact patch which gives you more grip. If you put solid wheels attached to a motor it wouldn’t take much effort to get them to slip in anything but the most ideal conditions. That’s why when people go off roading they get monster tires on tiny wheels and air them down until they’re ready to fall off.
In a horse drawn wagon solid wheels make sense because the wheels aren’t driving the carriage the horse is. The horse can step over bumps and put its hoof on solid ground. A wheel can’t do that, so it has to comply to the road. The up side is the solid wheel has a lot less rolling resistance. Early EVs had solid wheels because that’s just what we had.
You’ve never driven over a shitty dirt road eh? Top speed is like 5mph, mud, ruts, potholes so deep you bottom out, etc
Early EVs and horse carriers had large wheels because the roads and paths where dirt or cobblestone.
My point is that, if they had simply said “okay, that is the condition that we need to accept, adapt to and solve” like we do today with tarmac roads taking for granted, they could have developed a vehicle to do that. It would probably have larger wheels and soft suspension, but the only reason cars are shaped as they are today is because they didn’t solve it back then.
What happened instead was that low torque combustible engines were subsidized and rolled out on the condition that tarmac roads were also provided by the state. This was largely due to bitumen being a biproduct from petrol production. The oil industry pushed for both combustible engines and tarmac because they could supply both.
My previous rant is basically just entertaining the idea of what we’d do today if posed with a similar challenge. Roads are absolutely taken for granted and tmwe will never be able to undo that. It might be relevant if we ever inhabit another planet, but the last I read was that road planning had already begun on the moon…
Large flat roads are also more efficient. Have you ever driven down a bumpy road? That shit aint efficient. All of your horizontal speed gets turned into vertical speed in a jarringly unpleasant way. That’s part of why trains are so efficient because their tracks are so smooth.
Large wheels have nothing to do with a vehicles ability to go off road/on bumpy roads, if anything they’re counter productive because you want large soft tires and small wheels for that scenario.