The Rubber Manufacturers Association has set the week of June 3-9, 2012 as National Tire Safety Week, an event highlighting the RMA's "Be Tire Smart" programs on tire safety and proper maintenance. As part of the events, RMA provides tire retailers, auto dealers and repair shops with free "Be Tire Smart" brochures and other safety and maintenance materials. RMA says that more than 21,000 shops participated last year.

Read More...

Continental has launched their new line of Conti.eContact low rolling resistant tires designed specifically for hybrids and electric vehicles. What I know so far about this tire comes primarily from Continental's press release on it, but that does contain some interesting technical information. What it shows me is that the eContact is rather an odd duck, even by LRR standards.

Conti claims the tire has 30% less rolling resistance "than with conventional tires", which is the usual vaguely unverifiable number compared to a fuzzy dataset that we've come to expect from LRR marketing-speak. The very next sentence, however, turns out to be startlingly honest:

"Continental engineers achieved this reduction by using a completely unusual tire dimension."

Read More...

I usually make it a practice not to simply post corporate press releases verbatim, but there is a lot of good information here from Yokohama's senior VP of sales and marketing. In this wide-ranging marketing Q&A released by Yokohama, Dan King talks price increases, supply issues, economic indicators, Yoko's newest tires, the NHTSA, and sports marketing, while looking ahead to the future.

Question: How would you summarize 2011 for Yokohama?

Dan King: It was a very challenging year. The overall market was basically flat, and we are pleased to have seen growth in all segments of our business.

We weren't, however, as good of a supplier as we wanted to be for our customers. Our demand was very strong, but we were not able to fully supply our dealer partners and allocate product as efficiently as we should.

Question: Did the Japanese earthquake and tsunami cause some of the fill-rate problems?

King: To some degree. We had damages in our testing facilities , and we had to move some new product testing, but, overall, we feel very lucky that the impact to our U.S. operations was not as dramatic as it could have been.

Read More...

Yokohama will be increasing prices up to 8% on all consumer tires sold in the US on March 1. Yokohama cites the rising prices of transportation and logistics as the reason for the price hike, but I suspect that rubber prices are still having an effect.

In the meantime, the natural rubber situation has become increasingly confusing.

Read More...