Conti Product Manager Talks Trade Offs, Limitations, Tire Development - Tire Review Magazine

Conti Product Manager Talks Trade Offs, Limitations, Tire Development

Barry Terzaken is product manager for light truck/SUV tires at Continental Tire the Americas. His role is part technical and part marketing, working internally and externally to communicate difficult technologies. Coming from a technical background, Terzaken also well understands the development process and how performance parameters are determined and instituted.

TR: Let’s talk about iterations of tires. Continental has talked about positive product reviews from Tire Rack, Consumer Reports, Consumers Digest, and from any number of other magazines, and   you point to those and sat ‘This is how we know how well we are doing.’ That’s very superficial, but…

Terzaken:  It’s an indicator.  It’s a barometer in some respect, yeah.

TR:  So, other than saying the Grabber HTS has been in our line for eight years and it’s time for a change, how do you know when it’s time for a change in performance characteristics.  How are those determinations made?

Terzaken: So, one of the things that we do on a regular basis, besides monitoring various different external testing and surveys, we do our own internal benchmarks. We will take a look at competitor products and see where their performance is, and if there are any gaps or where we are excelling and if we’re at the point where we wish to be. With the Grabber HTS we introduced it into the market at a very high level and we’ve maintained that level, and people have been playing catch-up, for sure. And we pretty much followed our normal lifecycle of the product, seven years, but we also have some newer technologies that we can incorporate. We wanted to maintain that very high level of performance even for a value brand product. That was really one of the biggest drivers for this successor – the Grabber HTS60 – in particular. It takes many years to develop a tire, so if you wait until your performance wanes, you’re in trouble. Like I said, we know we had a great product, very well received in the market, and we had some things at our fingertips that we wanted to use, but we needed a new product to do that, and it has to do with the new contour that we use and compounding technologies.

TR: So, it’s not as simple as saying oh, ‘Look, we have a new tire and we’re just going to plug it into this product.’

Terzaken:  No, there’s clearly a long development cycle, which really does start with benchmarking – to understand the market, where it is – and then how we can incorporate what we want into the tire. We look at not only where the competitors are but also where we want to be. We don’t necessarily want to follow. We want to forge our own way and have our own brand image.

TR: Is everybody then chasing each other’s tails?

Terzaken: Not necessarily. We don’t really want to chase tails. We came in with the HTS as a top-performing tire, and we feel that people are chasing our tails. We had new technology available to us that we wanted to roll that into the next generation product. One of the things that we also rolled in is, that you needed a new pattern for, is a quieter tread pattern. So we used the latest NVH algorithms that are used for pattern design to make a more quiet tire. Not that we were waning because we had good acceptance in the OE world, where this is very, very important, and we wanted to keep that because that’s helped drive the Grabber HTS product to being successful, not only in the replacement market but as an OE tire. We wanted to give the OEMs a good solid reason to use our product.

TR: You mentioned the availability of new technologies that go into the Continental and General tires. How do you make the determination that you need a technology? Or do you stumble into technologies while working out another problem or simply say we need to do X?

Terzaken: We try and look at what the customer wants. And there’s always a balance between cost and performance, whatever that performance might be. We know with General, being a value brand, what’s important to the value customer? It’s value, it’s money, it’s longevity, tread life. So we want to take and push our compounding technology. We have technology projects to advance our technologies in compounding. Same thing with the other drivers in tread life. Tire shape, contour is also quite important, and we do more research into that, develop new contours that help out by doing the deeper research into it. The research isn’t so much stumbled across. It is directed…really, it’s sort of a feedback loop. You really want to see where the customer is.

TR: Somebody came up with the idea for the visual alignment feature that are on both General and Continental tires…

Terzaken: For sure.

TR:  …in different forms. Somebody had to come up with that. Was that a set task, like okay we need to do this, or did somebody say this might be an idea?

Terzaken: It’s more of the second. Again, we think about it, well wouldn’t it be a neat idea if your tire could tell you that right now it’s really no longer optimized for wet performance? Well, how do you do that? You have a brainstorming session, and different people throw different ideas in the hat. And then we just came up, and it wound up being a very simple and elegant solution. You have these letters in the tread that, at different depths, disappear. It’s looking at what’s useful to the customer. The replacement tire monitor is same thing. It uses tread wear to tell you when it’s time to replace the tire. There are things that we’re working on for future technologies where we think about what would be beneficial to the customer.

TR: Understanding that there’s obviously a price/cost is a factor in the whole thing, but how do you balance the development discovery to the two brands?

Terzaken: It all depends. If it incurs cost, like a very expensive compound for wet performance, we’d have to put that technology where we could get an appropriate return. If it’s a no-cost technology like the replacement tire monitor, we have slightly different versions for both brands.

TR: Engineers talk about trade-offs. It used to be more dramatic. It’s apparently not as dramatic as it used to be. Either that or we’re willing to accept reduced treadwear in favor of lower rolling resistance. If cost and price were not obstacles, is it possible to have a near-perfect tire?

Terzaken: It all depends on what you call near perfect.

TR: Exceedingly high levels of all the key parameters on a consistent basis.

Terzaken: There are physical limitations bound by physics and technologies available now. For example, before the introduction of silica, no matter how much money you spent and no matter what you did, there was a certain level of wear and wet grip that you could get. With the invention of silica technology, there was a quantum leap. So, right now the technology that you see in our Continental products, we are really at that level, and some of the tires demand quite a high selling point because they have the latest, the greatest, the best, no-holds-barred technology within them. One of the parameters for the compounding developers is cost, for sure. But I would say the perfect tire, I think we have them, as far as they could be. When you do win the accolades amongst your peers, you have the perfect tire.

TR: Looking at some of the options among natural rubber substitutions – guayule and Russian dandelions seem to be ahead – how do you think that’s all going to play out? Is it going to be a real technology? Or is the thought to go find some more land and plant rubber trees?  

Terzaken: I think that it’s really in its infancy right now. Personally, I think there’s a strong push for a very renewable source that has less impact ecologically. I think there’s a lot of potential.  It could happen. I don’t think you will replace rubber trees entirely, but as more research is done, who knows, maybe another quantum leap is found or at least find a way to utilize and process these other compounds in these plants.

TR: So, without giving away all the little secrets from a technology standpoint, what do we, as an industry, need to focus on going forward? Is it going to be rolling resistance? Is it going to be a refocus on tread wear and handling capabilities? Or is there another characteristic that people are talking about?

Terzaken: I’m very much thinking green.

TR: Green in terms of the production of the tire or of the tire’s performance?

Terzaken: In both aspects. One of the reasons that we’re looking into the dandelion, it’s green on the front side, and we’re also looking into longer tread life. You have scrap tires no matter what you do, you’re going to have a carcass at the end of it. Whether there are options for retreading or other things, you’re still going to have a scrap tire. So can you get that tire to last longer and have less of an impact on resources? Again, this has to do with rolling resistance. I think you’re going to continue to see rolling resistance be lowered. This is very much pushed by the OEMs. They’re very concerned about miles per gallon anywhere they can squeeze it out. They want to improve their numbers, and that makes sense. It’s on people’s minds. And it also makes sense to lower the impact. You have to think about the entire lifecycle, you know? You have a vehicle for 10 years, and you drive it for so many miles. How many tires are you going to put on it, and what is that overall impact going to be? We as a company are looking at that, and I’m kind of proud of that. I like that vision, for sure.

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