Based in Japan, Bridgestone Corporation is the world’s largest tyre and rubber company.
During the US-based MINExpo International trade show, Bridgestone Corporation unveiled its market-ready tyre pressure monitoring system for OTR radials. Marketed under the B-TAG (Bridgestone Intelligent Tag) name, this new system functions by utilising Bridgestone-developed sensors to measure and report both tyre pressure and temperature in real time.
Within Europe, Bridgestone is progressively replacing its R297 steer and M729 drive tyres with the newly-developed R-STEER 001 and R-DRIVE 001 regional application truck tyres. Commenting on the pair’s launch, which coincides with the IAA Commercial Vehicles show in Germany, Bridgestone says the new tyres are “designed for robustness in versatile usage, providing high-level performance and a long lifecycle in a wide range of operating conditions.”
Bridgestone Corporation held its third annual Bridgestone Global Total Quality Management (TQM) Conference on Friday, 14 September, at the company's Global Manufacturing Education Center (G-MEC) building in Kodaira City, Tokyo. The motto for this year's event was "Standards are Our Guiding Principle,” and a focus was placed upon ‘kaizen’ – the Japanese word describing improvement or change for the better – throughout the Bridgestone Group. In that context, Bridgestone Europe’s Burgos plant in Spain was given a TQM award, in particular thanks to “open and close standard based kaizen” in the plant’s curing department.”
At its press conference during the IAA Commercial Vehicles show, Bridgestone Europe shared further details of its new Total Tyre Care programme, a range of complementary truck tyre programmes its says are designed to provide fleet customers with complete peace of mind.
A South African court ruled yesterday that any tyre maker who didn’t adopt the country’s REDISA waste tyre management plant would “not be entitled to manufacture [or] import new, part worn or retreaded tyres” and would also be subject to sanctions outlined in the waste tyre regulations and other legislative provisions. This decision, given by Judge Piet van der Byl at the Gauteng North High Court, put an end to efforts by the SA Tyre Recycling Process Company (SATRP) and Bridgestone South Africa to block this.
Technology drawn from tyre retreading forms the core component of a new truck and bus tyre manufacturing process developed by Bridgestone Corporation. The Japanese manufacturer says the new technology, which it calls ‘Trisaver’, is expected to result in both significant resource conservation and enhanced fuel efficiency. The name Trisaver, incidentally, refers to the three types of savings Bridgestone says the technology enables – savings of costs, resources and CO2 emissions.
During a visit to Bridgestone’s Sweden Proving Ground earlier in the year, Tyres & Accessories drove in temperatures way below freezing in some of the most extreme conditions in Europe, using the manufacturer’s current Blizzak LM-30 winter rubber, and the prototype of its successor to be, the LM-32, which remains in development for the moment, as well as a comparative summer weather tyre, which behaved about as well as one would expect on heavy snow. There was, however, an intermediate all-weather tyre option, which the company is particularly focusing on in Oceanic climates such as that found in the UK.
Benoit Raulin has taken on responsibility for Bridgestone Europe’s French and Benelux markets after his appointment as managing director of the company’s Western region. He succeeds Eric Gaétan in the role following the latter’s appointment as managing director of Bridgestone Europe’s Consumer business unit in Brussels.
Firestone is a car company. This is the message at the heart of Bridgestone America’s new brand campaign. Titled “Drive a Firestone”, the campaign hinges on the notion that, while it doesn’t actually produce cars, Firestone is indeed a car company. The tyre maker’s message is that regardless what a motorist drives, Firestone tyres and the service its retailers provide can help make their car run stronger, longer.
The upcoming IAA Commercial Vehicles 2012 fair in Hannover, Germany will serve as an opportunity for Bridgestone to present its new Total Tyre Care programme. Describing Total Tyre Care, Bridgestone says it offers fleets “carefree tyre management through a flexible range of complementary truck tyre programmes.”
In addition to its research into guayule and Russian dandelion-sourced rubber, Bridgestone has looked into the potential applications of soybean oil in tyre manufacture. The company’s American operation has now unveiled a concept tyre it says contains more than ten per cent soybean oil. Bridgestone Americas Tire Operations displayed the Firestone branded 800/70R38 Radial Deep Tread 23 agricultural tyre at the Farm Progress 2012 Show in Boone, Iowa, and says soybean oil may be present in its production agricultural tyres as early as next year.
Bridgestone Motorsport Tyre Development Department manager Shinji Aoki has revealed that MotoGP riders’ test session at Brno suggests the tyre supplier’s experimental new hard compound tyre improves on the warm-up performance of the current hard tyre. The results were far from conclusive though, with few riders choosing to test the rubber in cool conditions.
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Repsol Honda’s Dani Pedrosa won an exciting last lap battle with Factory Yamaha Racing’s Jorge Lorenzo to win MotoGP’s Czech Grand Prix for his second successive victory. Lorenzo led Pedrosa for the first half of the race, with the two riders setting new circuit lap record on six consecutive laps; Lorenzo’s eighth lap time of 1:56:274 being the quickest. After Pedrosa made his way past Lorenzo on lap eleven the two riders held position until the last lap where Lorenzo squeezed past Pedrosa, leading to a close final bend where the Repsol Honda rider hit back, getting the better drive to the line to win the race by 0.178 seconds. Monster Yamaha Tech3’s Cal Crutchlow claimed his first ever MotoGP podium by taking third place, while Power Electronics Aspar’s Randy de Puniet made the most of his good qualifying performance to cross the finish line in eighth position to be the highest placed CRT rider. Bridgestone stayed in the Czech Republic after the race weekend, using Brno as the venue for its group test, where the company was due to unveil a new compound.
Bridgestone has expressed pride in the contribution its Ecopia tyres made towards the completion of a 12,500 kilometre journey made by three all-electric Nissan Leaf cars within a 42 day period. This feat, the tyre maker comments, is thought to be the longest journey achieved by these electric vehicles in such a short period of time.
In spite of their numerous, verifiable benefits, retreaded tyres still battle against negative perceptions; some question their durability, while others hold them responsible for the strips of scrap tread, or “alligators”, seen on the motorway shoulder. In what it refers to as “an effort to set the record straight on retreads,” Bridgestone Commercial Solutions (BCS) has re-launched its US-based ‘Retread Instead’ website as an online campaign aimed at educating truckers and fleets on the value of extending tyre life.
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