Goodyear Ventures, partnerships carrying tire maker into the future

AKRON—For Goodyear, the path to future mobility ventures off the paved roadways, on to the sidewalks and straight through the clouds.

Through a series of investments and partnerships, the Akron-based tire maker is learning to harness the power of today's technology to develop solutions that drive mobility further.

To do that, Goodyear needs data—lots of data—and plenty of feedback. It also needs some relatively efficient ways to collect and analyze those data points and ideas. By pairing the right insights with the right R&D, Goodyear can develop new solutions that provide its customers—consumers and fleet operators alike—with the know-how and ability to move confidently and efficiently within new mobility landscapes.

And that's where Goodyear Ventures comes in. The venture capital fund, through which the tire maker plans to invest $100 million in the coming decade, enables Goodyear to financially support promising start-up companies and technologies within the mobility spheres. It also allows the tire maker to partner with those innovative companies and expand its own understanding of the role it will play as a leader in the field.

"It all comes down to the big overall strategy for Goodyear," said Erin Spring, Goodyear's senior director of new ventures. "In the first 120 years, we were building our ecosystem to enable getting people from point A to point B as easily as possible. Now, with new technology coming into play, ... (we see) new ways to add value for our customers.

"What is the ecosystem of solutions we need to be problem-solving?"

In recent weeks, Goodyear has unveiled a pair of partnerships that it believes will help answer those critical questions.

Through a collaboration with San Francisco-based Voyomotive L.L.C., Goodyear is piloting tire-monitoring solutions that allow vehicle owners and fleet operators to engage in predictive maintenance. The cloud-based service captures and analyzes relevant tire performance data—such as tire pressure—and delivers pertinent information to the driver or vehicle owner through email, text or mobile app.

The tire maker's insights, when combined with Voyomotive's telematics data, can predict tire concerns days before the TPMS light illuminates, Goodyear said.

Voyomotive is one piece in the future mobility puzzle for Goodyear. By leveraging its expertise and embracing insights from a variety of partners, Goodyear can better connect its technologies to expanding applications.

Goodyear's partnership with UFODrive is proof of how that can work. The collaboration with the all-digital, all-electric car rental company offers Goodyear the opportunity to build on the Total Mobility service it launched in 2019.

Total Mobility uses data-driven monitoring and predictive analytics to provide fleet operators with real-time tire performance information. Originally used in the trucking industry, the program has been tailored to better serve the needs of Luxembourg-headquartered UFODrive, which relies on those data points to maximize the efficiency of its all-electric car rental fleet. The company's goal is to streamline the rental car experience throughout Europe by providing app-based, paperless services.

With Goodyear's tire monitoring system and UFODrive e-mobility software, the duo aims to maximize energy usage and tire replacement cost savings, while reducing the fleet's carbon footprint

To truly understand new mobility technology and recognize your place in it, you have to examine the challenges and successes from a number of perspectives and angles. And that is the underlying goal of Goodyear Ventures: to establish partnerships and build connections that allow the tire maker to understand the entirety of next-generation mobility and automotive technology. In the end, Goodyear believes that understanding better positions it to provide well-refined, industry-tested solutions for a range of customers.

"We can't do that with one or two partnerships," Spring said. "We need to work with and plug into different capabilities while building our own around digital."

So Goodyear is plugging into the best opportunities it uncovers.

Take for instance the 2018 collaboration with Mcity, a University of Michigan-led public-private partnership designed to advance connected and automated vehicles and supportive technologies. For its role in the project, Goodyear conducted testing that further develops its intelligent tires and application sensors, while expanding its understanding of connected tires and vehicles.

While not part of the Goodyear Venture program, the partnership provided valuable insights that can help carry Goodyear.

Earlier this year, Goodyear Ventures disclosed that it was joining a group of investors behind StarShip Technologies, a company that has designed and developed small, autonomous robots for small deliveries such as meals and groceries.

The Starship robots—small storage-container-shaped vehicles with six wheels—are used on college campuses and in metropolitan settings where they can navigate shorter distances on sidewalks.

"Those EVs are a very different segment than what we have served to date," Spring said. Goodyear's aim is "to understand how that segment is growing, and what are the key problems they are looking to solve. Getting a front row seat at those learning opportunities, that has been a really interesting space."

Shortly after detailing its investment in StarShip, Goodyear Ventures said it would invest in TuSimple Inc., a San Diego-based technology company focused on making it possible for heavy-duty trucks to operate autonomously.

TuSimple, whose goal is to develop commercial-ready Level 4 autonomous driving to the logistics industry, operates autonomous trucks in Arizona, Texas, China, Japan and Europe using an ecosystem made up of digital maps, strategic terminals and an autonomous fleet operations system.

If it seems like Goodyear's approach to new mobility technology is proactive and wide-reaching, that's a good thing.

The goal, after all, is to build the best possible solutions for the entire future mobility spectrum. From autonomous robots delivering dinner across university campuses to autonomous trucks delivering essentials across the U.S., Goodyear is interested in exploring it.

"It's not always a one-size-fits-all solution for ICE, EVs and AVs," Spring said. "We need a slightly different suite of solutions.

"I am excited to see all these different spaces in mobility and how they start to tie into one another from the very short robot delivery all the way to the trucks moving goods cross country in an autonomous way."