Michelin to Use Technology to Break Away

By Alex Law
MacLeans magazine

“Nunc est bibendum.”

Horace originally meant that to be a call to merriment, or, in a more literal translation, “Now is the time to drink.”

When Michelin first used the phrase decades ago on an advertising poster, it was the tagline to a sketch of a man made out of tyres (now known as Bibendum) who was looking down a stretch of pavement filled with the kind of debris normally found on the world’s roads at the time. The message then meant, “I can handle all that.”

Well, now Michelin could use the expression again, but this time to signal its desire to chew up the problems currently besetting the tyre industry and, as a result, its competition.

For the most part, this is good news for the consumer in North America, because Michelin is working on developing technologies that will directly improve all aspects of a tyre’s performance and its lifespan.

Michelin’s CEO, Edouard Michelin, recently outlined the challenges facing the French firm and how its proposed solutions would benefit consumers in North America and rest of the developed world, and, longer term, China, India, Russia and the rest of the developing world.

Most immediately, Michelin said, the cost of raw materials — rubber and petroleum products — continues to rise around the world, and he expects that to continue.

This means the company that bears his name has to “make tyres last longer, use less raw materials, increase efficiency and keep developing technology,” Michelin said, “but particularly ‘green’ solutions.”

That would be “green” in the sense of using fewer natural resources, including the rubber and the petroleum products that help create the tyre, and the oil that powers the vehicles.

As the president of worldwide research for Michelin, Didier Miraton ensures that the firm is “the industry leader in investing in research and development.”

The firm is “looking beyond tyres now because of the emerging markets in China and India. The company is not focused on tyres,” he said, “it is thinking in ‘mobility’ terms.”

To answer the challenges of the developing markets, said Miraton, Michelin would still be making tyres 20 or 30 years from now, “but there will also be other products that might replace the traditional tyres.” While he didn’t want to give too much away for competitive reasons, Miraton did allow as how they were working on such things as fuel cells and the development of cars that weigh 850 kg (about the size of a Smart coupe) that are meant to be driven only in cities and towns.

“The main challenge,” Miraton said, “is to reduce the rolling resistance of tyres by at least half and for them to last twice as long.” Doubling the length of time that tyres last is something that Michelin has already done in the past decade, by the way.

Rolling resistance is also being improved so that a car needs to use less fuel to move itself along, but so much of that depends upon the proper maintenance of the tyres.

To help drivers with that job, Michelin is also looking into electronics, Miraton said, specifically a chip that can be embedded in the tyre or on the vehicle and will keep track of such information as how far the tyres have traveled, pressure spots, how heavy is the load they’re carrying, and the temperature of tyre.

This system will be more for fleets of trucks so people know when they need to be fixed or changed, Miraton said, but there could be some benefit for general consumers.

More useful for the general consumer would be the holy grail of tyre maintenance — a system that will vehicle occupants to check pressure and to inflate/deflate tyre pressure to adapt to road conditions. This already exists in some niche vehicles, but it is not slick or sophisticated enough for consumer applications yet, though Michelin hopes to make it so.

On the safety front, Miraton said that Michelin is also working on technologies that would help vehicles stop in a shorter distance, and is having some success with that. Indeed, the company hopes to release a tyre for large work trucks in the near future that would shorten their stopping distance by 20 to 30 per cent.

The immediate of that will be most visible to average consumers when one of those big work trucks is trying to come to a stop behind them in their compact car.

There are also run-flats that work almost as well flat as they do when inflated and don’t require a spare, and there will be more improvement there.

Beyond that there might be the tyre without rubber that Michelin introduced at the Detroit auto show (the Tweel) and who knows what else?

If this all works out, Michelin will probably have to consider a new Latin phrase: “Nulli secundus.”