As it celebrates its 75th year of tire testing operations in San Angelo, Texas, The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company is planning two new expansion projects at the facility.
Goodyear has added a second vehicle dynamics area – a 324,000 square foot paved pad – and is currently building an additional evaluation facility for off-the-road products that will include equipment for testing earthmover tires.
The San Angelo facility covers 7,250 acres and includes 58 miles of roads and track, 14 miles of fence and more than 200 test vehicles. Associates there test approximately 20,000 tires annually. There are 53 different test surfaces, ranging from asphalt and concrete to bricks, blocks, dirt, mud and more.
The new vehicle dynamics area is optimized for tire testing in extreme wet conditions and is a precision-engineered paved surface with a 1-degree slope to enable constant water flow across the surface, Goodyear says. All water is recycled and reused.
In addition to improvements in the testing and analysis of large off-the-road tires, Goodyear recently added a 250-ton, 25-foot-tall earthmover haul truck to its fleet.
