BMW 6 series OE tyres complete Hankook’s luxury marque portfolio

Hankook is suppling tyres for the BMW 6 Series Gran Turismo in a development the company sees as completing its luxury OE portfolio. Hankook already provides both UHP summer and winter tyres for the BMW 7 Series. The BMW group’s new Gran Turismo will now also be delivered with Ventus S1 evo 2 ultra-high performance (UHP) run-flat summer tyres. The tyres were developed in Hanover and are produced at the company’s European factory in Hungary. Specifically, the car will be supplied with special 245/45 R19 98Y RSC front and 275/40 R19 101Y RSC rear run-flat sizes.

In addition to the BMW 6 Series Gran Turismo and the luxury sedan BMW 7 Series, Hankook currently supplies a total of 11 models of the long-established Bavarian company. Some of the BMW X1, X2, X3, X4, X5, X6 cars, the BMW 2 series Active Tourer as well as the BMW 4 and 5 series, also roll off the assembly line on Hankook tyres. Hankook has, thus, been able to significantly expand its original equipment business when compared to previous years. The cooperation with the BMW Group has been in place since 2011. It includes the supply of passenger car and SUV tyres, from the summer, winter and all-weather segment to sports tyres.

“Being the original equipment partner of premium manufacturers such as the BMW and being able to contribute to driving this development forward makes us very proud indeed. The technical intricacies of the BMW 6 Series Gran Turismo are probably easier to discover than those of our tyres, but, nevertheless, our tyres will continue to play a major role in the future of the automobile,” says the head of Hankook Europe, Han-Jun Kim.

“We had to combine excellent driving and comfort features with exceptional performance on wet as well as dry roads. It required us to not only develop a special tread mix, but also to come up with a completely new combination of materials, profile design and structure“ explains graduate engineer Klaus Krause, head of the European Development Center (ETC) at Hankook Hanover, where the tyres are developed for the BMW Group in Europe.

On 25 September 2018 Hankook launched its latest luxury UHP tyre, the Ventus S1 evo 3.