Hold your horses – Attar tyres gallop into town

It has been a while since we last mentioned the KamaTyresKZ tyre factory in Kazakhstan, a joint venture between Russia’s Tatneft and vehicle manufacturer the Allur Group of Companies. The plant officially opened in December 2022 and is capable of making 3 million passenger vehicle tyres and 500,000 truck tyres a year at full capacity. KamaTyresKZ initially produced tyres under the Forza brand name but is now debuting a new brand – Attar.

The joint venture partners tasked a team of local and international advertising agencies to find a name and an identity that’s both in tune with the culture and history of Kazakhstan while understandable in other languages and regions. The team decided upon Attar, a name translated from the Kazakh word for horses.

Announcing the new brand’s debut, Tatneft comments that Attar tyres confidently guide the herd of horses hiding under the car’s bonnet. Tyre sidewalls will feature the Attar name alongside a stylised horse’s head.

According to Tatneft, the KamaTyresKZ plant will produce the Attar brand for both domestic sale and export. Having never seen an Attar tyre we cannot say whether they’re thoroughbreds or utter pony, but Tatneft reports that Attar’s quality will be in line with the “best international practices in the tyre industry.” The KamaTyresKZ factory in Saran has introduced a practice it calls “200 per cent quality control” – in practice this mathematical impossibility involves subjecting each tyre to two stages of control. After being visually inspected, each tyre undergoes an automated inspection. Plant workers will send tyres that don’t make the grade to be recycled.