Michelin is out to make world's greenest tyre
Making tyres for an electric vehicle (EV) is a ruthless exercise in compromise. Too much sticking and the car won't travel as far on a charge; too little, it will silently slide off the road. Exacerbating the equation is the fact that these vehicles are ponderously heavy.
Michelin, however, says it has finally perfected the mix after 30 years of tinkering with its rubber recipes. If EV ranges tick slightly higher in the next few months, the battery chemists won't deserve all the praise; save some for the tyre wizards.
Alexis Garcin, chairman and president of Michelin North America, talks about how he's preparing for a massive wave of electric vehicles.
How does your approach change with an electric vehicle?
It has more or less the same complexity as making a tyre for a combustion car, but it brings it to another level. You have to ensure safety but you have to minimise resistance, because it has a direct link with the fuel consumption. And the high tech materials used have to be lighter and lighter, because if the car is getting heavier, we have to make sure that the tyre won't. That's really a subtle mix.
So these tyres are purpose-built for EVs?
In March, we unveiled the e.Primacy, which will come later this year for larger SUVs in the US. That tyre is bringing up to 7 per cent additional range to electric vehicles, because it is optimised to reduce the road resistance without compromising any of the performance. That's a technology we mastered and we're just rolling it out.
The second example is on the Pilot Sport, which we just released. It's a dedicated tyre for electric sports cars and it brings up to 37 miles of additional range, because of that optimisation of running resistance.
What does R&D like now?
look
We have massively reaccelerated our investments in what we call the high-tech material division. Those open us up to new domains, like aerospace, like medical and other industries. Our vision is to have a fully renewable and recyclable tyre by 2050. Today, more or less, 30 per cent of the tyre is renewable and recyclable.
Has EV adoption changed your sales and distribution strategy?
I think personally what's happening right now is a deep transformation of the auto industry and it pushes the car manufacturers to think about a new business model. The value stream will probably move from buying a car and getting maintenance to some services that you buy every month or some packages you can integrate every six months, depending on new features and technologies that are being developed. We were the first manufacturer, starting in 2012, to put an RFID chip in every mediumand heavy-duty truck tyre. By 2023, every passenger car tyre will be equipped with an RFID chip because we believe they are a nice business model. There are so many offers we can build around tyres, because at the end of the day that's the only part of the car touching the road.
When you have these conversations, with say, Tesla or Rivian, how customised do you get?
When we talk to [manufacturers], most of the time, the tyres developed are made specifically to those cars. Because the cars are so unique, because of the interaction of the weight, the torque and the chassis of the vehicle, each one is different. Most of the tyres are very, very tuned and made specific down to the model level. It's much more complex than it appears.