Tire Society panel focuses on the future

AKRON—Changes in the tire industry will be driven by future trends in the larger automotive industry like electric and autonomous vehicles.

The Tire Society's panel covered some of those changes in "Tire Industry Re-alignment: Necessities to Mobility Market Trends," held Sept. 11 at the 38th Annual Tire Society Business Meeting and Conference on Tire Science and Technology at the Hilton Akron/Fairlawn.

The panel was moderated by Ric Mousseau, lead tire modeling engineer for General Motors. It included Robert Asper, director of core engineering for Bridgestone Americas Inc.; Bruce Lambillotte, vice president of technical consulting, Smithers; and Greg Smith, senior engineer-virtual submissions, for Goodyear.

The panel started by discussing the impact of EVs on the market. Lambillotte talked about a Smithers market study that predicted that new EV registrations would grow substantially over the next nine years, with a cumulative adjusted growth rate of 26 percent per year.

"We have to keep in mind that that's starting from a very small base, No. 1," Lambillotte said. "No. 2, a tremendous percentage of that growth is in China."

Two thirds of the EV market's growth is predicted to be in China, with less both in Europe and the U.S., and the rest of the world after them, Lambillotte said. From a technical standpoint, one of the top requirements for EVs is range, which from a tire standpoint translates to rolling resistance. A United Kingdom-based survey asked how much range an EV really needed to be able to travel on a single charge, and more than a quarter of the respondents felt between about 250-375 miles. Another 26 percent of people said they wanted more than 375 on a single charge.

Noise reduction and abatement makes up the second rated requirement for consumers. For EVs and AVs, a large fraction of the noise comes from tire contact with the road, Lambillotte said. While drivers aren't looking for a completely silent vehicle, they don't want the noise to come from the tire/road interface. Wet and dry traction make up the third rated consumer requirement, with load carrying in fourth and wear resistance in fifth.

Asper took a counterpoint to the question of range, as many consumers won't actually need such a large range on a single charge for EVs.

"I think most people, if you get them to 50 miles, that's all you need in a day, in something that's reasonable to charge overnight," he said.

Reducing the overall range could allow a similar reduction in vehicle mass and load-carrying capacity. While EVs have been looked at as a one-to-one replacement for internal combustion engines, the automotive industry should be educating consumers about the differences, he said. The answer for some consumers could be owning two vehicles: one EV for local driving and an internal combustion engine vehicle for long-distance travel. They also could rent an ICE vehicle for vacation or a trip to another city.

"I think we're missing some market for making a much lower-cost and a much lighter weight, and then eliminate some of the problems that we're having by not changing the configuration of the vehicle," Asper said.

Smith said "range anxiety" was a factor for EVs reach with consumers, even though many fall in the range of 50 miles per charge and could benefit from other EV perks.

"It's this issue of people seeing it as a one-to-one replacement, like it must do everything that an ICE car can do in order to be useful," Smith said. "I think electric cars already have an awful lot, so they don't have to do absolutely everything. One advantage is that you never have to go to a petrol station again. You just charge and you go out, which is way cheaper. So you're already saving a lot of money and gaining a lot of convenience just simply by the mechanism of charging. It doesn't necessarily need to be a one-to-one replacement."

Hybrid vehicles also could help open the market, using a battery pack and a small ICE as a range extender, similar to the BMW i3. The ICE can be used to generate electricity once the battery runs out, which is a more efficient design with a single speed and load, Smith said. Regardless whether current EVs cover the range of the average driver, public perception makes "range anxiety" a real obstacle for the automotive market.

"It isn't as necessary as people think, but the fact the customer thinks it is, is a problem nonetheless," Smith said. "Whether we think it doesn't actually matter, or there's an engineering reason it matters. It doesn't actually factor in. The fact that the customer thinks that that's a problem means it's a problem."

"A customer can be wrong," replied Asper.

Torque in EVs can be modified and reduced by original equipment manufacturers, which would reduce stress requirements for tire manufacturers. Instead of treating every EV like a sports car where torque can be a selling point, look at the wider market where a vehicle like a minivan will probably have OEM limits, Asper said. He compared it to looking at high end computers when what actually meets the consumer's needs is a tablet.

Consumers want the torque and long range because it's fun and can be reassuring to have the capability to drive that distance if necessary in a what-if situation, Smith said. But designing for those fringe cases can pull attention from making a product that will work in 99 percent of situations.

"I think that what will happen is we have to put the vehicles in the customers' hands, and they'll determine how they'll be used," Lambillotte said. "Then we'll probably have to reiterate on the design and performance of these vehicles."

Autonomous vehicles provide an additional set of challenges for tire manufacturers as the market shifts more toward commercialization. While that sounds like a potential loss, it could open up new avenues for tire technology, Asper said.

"It's the proliferation that we have in sizes and different applications," he said. "As that starts to get dialed back, I think, rather than making it harder it actually makes it potentially easier to be better at one thing."

Once AV fleets become a larger segment of the market, tire purchases and new product development will become much more data- and engineering-driven rather than an impulse or personalization purchase, Smith said. For example, fleet managers would look for data that shows better features to reduce accidents and litigation exposure, or how a higher price can be offset by fuel cost savings.

Additionally, as AVs are developing, they're limited to lower speeds, which can take a lot of performance requirements out of the equation, Asper said.

Highway driving for AVs also will change their usage for higher speeds, Mousseau said. Manufacturers could end up producing two tire solutions, one focused on city driving at lower speeds, and one for highway driving.

Autonomous trucks also will change requirements for the tire industry, as a truck will be able to drive from one depot to another with only short stops in between for loading and unloading, similar to the shipping industry, Smith said.

When more tires reach the commodity level through AVs, it will change the way the average consumer thinks about them, Asper said.

"There's not a lot of talk about how much horsepower the latest airplane has, or what's the fuel economy of the Airbus versus the Boeing? You don't think about it, you don't own it," Asper said. "You talk about how much does it cost to fly this airline and that airline, and which one has better food and which one makes you stand in line the longest. When things go away from the car that I buy and I want a certain color and it says something about me, I think we're dealing in a different world."

A 2016 market investigation by Smithers showed that dependability is one of the most desirable tire qualities, which can be achieved through run-flats or sealant, Lambillotte said. The other large area is connectivity of the tire, and what evolutionary changes can be made to make the tire smarter. At minimum, consumers want the tire to know things like how old it is, when it was mounted and when it was last rotated. Future tire designs will provide more sophisticated ways to control the flow of information through the tire for connected vehicles, "where we get to the point where the tire collects information on the coefficients of friction, whether it's dry, wet, ice, snow, whatever. These are the kinds of things down the road as benefiting autonomous vehicles, on one hand.

"On the other hand, I haven't seen much in autonomous vehicles as far as development work that set back and said, 'We just can't get there from here. We're just going to have to stop until the tire catches up.' I don't think we've seen that at all," he said.

Tires for EVs haven't required revolutionary new technology so far. The addition of technology such as additional foam in the inner liner for noise abatement is the closest that gets, he said.

Gathering information through sensors and creating more connected vehicles is an important step to tackling another new obstacle created by EVs: fewer maintenance checks. Consumers won't need to return to the dealer for oil changes and other routine maintenance, giving fewer chances to catch a problem before it becomes worse, Mousseau said.

"Now, rather than going every 5,000 miles where they do an oil change and a tire rotation, there may be longer intervals between service," he said. "Something has got to tell the driver that, 'Hey, you've got to rotate your tires.' And maybe the rotation might look a little different on electric vehicles, too."

In terms of AVs, OEMs are going to be the decider on what kinds of smart tire technology will be necessary "because we sell the cars," Mousseau said. The tire industry is investing in the technology, and eventually that will bubble up to OEMs as well. If there's a lot of motivation from the tire industry and manufacturers can show value of additional technology, OEMs will incorporate it.

Smart tires and tire sensing technology are almost a requirement for AVs, Smith said. When a tire gets punctured in a current vehicle, the driver can feel the change. In an AV, the car itself has to be programmed to notice the difference and respond appropriately.

"This sort of sensing technology needs to come in, because otherwise who's going to check it?" he said.

Collaboration in the tire industry initially will be challenging as new technology is developed, Asper said. It's tough to have discussions across companies because each company is trying to get there first, to have the advantage on others. He points to Michelin's work with RFID tags, and the licensing agreement to use the technology as an effort to create a standard across the industry. As AVs and sensors in tires become more necessary in vehicles, "we've got to be speaking the same language. We've got to be giving similar data sets. It has to get there, and it has to be standard."

In the interim, development across companies probably will be complex and competitive, because it's difficult to discuss standards when the technology still is being created, he said. No manufacturer wants to freeze its work to talk with a rival, because another six months of work could make the difference in owning the patent the standards will be based on.

"Eventually, we're going to move in that direction," he said. "But when you start to talk about competitive forces, it moves away from technology very quickly and into the business relationships."