Now, I’m going to start off with a simple disclaimer: Anything is possible. Literally anything.
That said, more than one person is having a hard time choking down OE fitment claims published on Colorado Tire Corp./Washington Tire Corp. sales materials. In this space on Feb. 28, we noted some of CTC/WTC’s claims that some of its OE customers include Caterpillar, Komatsu, Terex, Belza (CIS), Bharath (India), LeTourneau and shipbuilder ADSB Materials. Other customers listed on the sales sheet were Anglo American, Reliance Infrastructure (India), MAK (Mongolia), Huaneng Power International (China), KPC Indonesia, SouthGobi Resources (Mongolia), and Goldcorp (Canada).
Well, we heard back from a few folks that cast doubt on some of these customer claims. To wit, one OEM tire buyer stated flatly: “I don’t want to spend any more than 30 seconds on this topic (it probably isn’t worth the amount of time spent sending this e-mail), however, Colorado Tire is not on our supplier list (obviously). I don’t even know if Colorado Tire exists, but can assure you that we aren’t buying anything from them. You can state that the tire and rim product manager from (company name withheld) has contacted you and made that statement, but please don’t list my name. I don’t want to have an interview, get phone calls, or e-mails related to this.”
There you go.
Another resource told me that, “none of our field people know of any Colorado tires running in the U.S. or Canada.” And that statement came after I asked for clarification on the word “none.”
That same response came from another set of field engineers I spoke with directly at the recent OTR Tire Conference.
To be fair, though, some OE tire supply deals in the OTR segment are “done so loosely” that “perhaps Colorado tires are ‘mounted’ on some of these vehicles, but not necessarily because Colorado sold them directly to the OEM.”
In other words, CTC/WTC doesn’t actually sell tires directly to the OEM, but because the end-user needs rubber, they find a set of Colorado OTR tires and put them on the equipment so it can be moved to the work site. After that, who knows.
In other words, again, CTC/WTC’s customer claims may be just a little thin.
But, according [email protected], who responded to my blog post online:
“Yes there is a live experience of Colorado tires of 45-65 bias which has run touched almost 7,000 hrs at a coal mine in abusive conditions in India without any tire maintenance. This is equivalent to a Good Year Tire & believe me CTC guys are really committed to after sales service now. In fact they are better than Michelin who are flying on air & they are least bothered about any service & they charge price of tire almost equivalent to an ounce of Gold. Further 40R57 Colorado Steel radial tires are functioning at Reliance without any hassles.”
Like I said, anything is possible.
