The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company has officially opened its new manufacturing facility in Dudelange, Luxembourg, an operation it calls a “first of its kind” for the company. The inauguration on 5 May follows a US$77 million investment in industry 4.0 digital manufacturing processes at the site.
The USA has classified natural rubber as a strategic raw material that serves as a critical ingredient in military, aircraft and truck tyres. The country currently relies on rubber imports for its tyre production but wishes to reduce this dependency, and government and military are thus working with private partners to accelerate commercialisation of natural rubber from dandelions. Goodyear Tire & Rubber will play a key role in achieving this goal.
Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company has taken a further step towards its aim of achieving material sustainability by producing a tyre with 70 per cent sustainable material content. While this Goodyear Assurance tyre is a demonstration model and won’t be offered for sale just now, innovations contained within will certainly appear in future ranges.
Goodyear Tire & Rubber may soon be utilising carbon black produced from methane and/or biomethane in its tyres thanks to a new partnership with US-based clean materials firm Monolith. The two companies have signed a collaboration agreement and letter of intent covering the development and potential use of such products, which are made through a plasma-based methane pyrolysis process.
The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company has named Ellis Jones its chief sustainability officer and a company vice-president. Jones’ appointment took effect yesterday, and in this role, he reports to Chris Helsel, senior vice president, global operations and chief technology officer.
The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company has entered into a strategic collaboration with Plus (formerly Plus.ai), a global provider of self-driving truck technology, to provide optimised, autonomous trucking solutions. Goodyear brings a range of services to this collaboration, including connected tyres, and the partners will explore how Plus’s autonomous driving system can incorporate feedback from these tyres into Plus’s online, machine learning-based fuel optimisation, to further improve fuel economy.
The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company has introduced a tyre intelligence solution for cargo van fleets. Called Goodyear SightLine, the solution will initially be available in Europe and North America, and later this year Goodyear will also offer it to original equipment customers and emerging fleet and mobility providers.
A broadened remit for Christopher P. Helsel: The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company has announced he will succeed Jonathan Bellissimo as senior vice president, global operations following the latter’s retirement after a Goodyear career spanning four decades. Helsel will also continue as chief technology officer, a role he’s held for the past three years.
With the addition of a new DiM250 Dynamic Driving Simulator, the Goodyear Innovation Center in Colmar-Berg, Luxembourg will gain greater tyre testing capabilities. The equipment supplied by VI-grade, a provider of real-time simulation software and driver-in-the-loop simulators, will also enhance technical collaboration between Goodyear Tire & Rubber’s European operation and its headquarters in Akron, USA, where another DiM250 recently entered operation.
Goodyear Tire & Rubber says its road testing and customer field tests involving connected tyres recently surpassed the 3-million-mile mark with initial studies showing these connected tyres can reduce stopping distance lost between a new and worn tyre by 30 per cent.
Goodyear has purchased new VI-grade driving simulators, including a dynamic model, to enhance its product development. The tyre manufacturer has selected a Compact Simulator recently delivered to the company’s innovation centre in Luxembourg and a Dynamic Driving Simulator DiM250 (Driver-in-Motion) to be installed in Akron, Ohio, in the coming months.
Goodyear is an old hand at the space business, but it’s been decades since it has worked on anything that’s entered the ‘final frontier’. That’ll change next week with the expected launch of the SpaceX CRS-18 on 21 July. When it blasts off towards the International Space Station (ISS) it’ll carry a Goodyear experiment on board. Success will lead to better-performing tyres in future.
Collaborations with US-based shared mobility providers Borrow and Envoy are providing Goodyear Tire & Rubber the opportunity to pilot its predictive digital service solutions with electric vehicle fleets. Experience gained with the two companies allows Goodyear’s Innovation Lab in San Francisco to test solutions on new models of emerging mobility.
Goodyear has started to pilot a new predictive digital service with Borrow, a short-term, fully electric car subscription company based in West Hollywood, California. Reflecting the tyre manufacturer’s increasing interest in future mobility services, Goodyear is using its predictive tyre servicing solution for connected fleets to forecast and automatically schedule needed tyre maintenance and replacement. Leveraging Goodyear’s expertise in tyres, the cloud-based platform predicts and automatically schedules tyre servicing via vehicle data and proprietary algorithms.
After what has been described as the “tightest race” at the 2018 Tire Technology International Awards for Innovation and Excellence, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company was named the winner in the Environmental Achievement of the Year category. The tyre maker was awarded for its work in applying soybean oil in tyre tread compound as a replacement for traditional petroleum oil. Goodyear narrowly beat fellow shortlistee PPG/US DOE, which had been nominated for its work to combine silica with natural rubber to reduce rolling resistance in truck tyres. The shortlist also included Apollo Tyres/RRI and JK Tyre & Industries Ltd.
Goodyear Tire & Rubber