Yokohama Rubber Co. has built and opened an indoor test facility for winter tires on ice. Located at Yokohama Rubber’s Tire Test Center of Hokkaido (TTCH) in Asahikawa City, Japan, the new facility began testing tires on January 5.
The TTCH was opened in December 2015 to expand Yokohama Rubber’s tire testing capacity and introduce more sophisticated evaluation methods. The new indoor facility, featuring an ice track, further enhances TTCH’s testing capabilities. Compared to outdoor test courses, an indoor course is unaffected by such external factors as the weather and outdoor temperatures, and the ice track’s condition can be kept stable. As a result, the accuracy of test data can be improved, facilitating the development of more advanced technologies. The new facility’s size—total floor area of about 2,860 square meters, at 119m x 24m, and an 8.8m high ceiling (at highest point)—makes the indoor facility suitable for testing tires used on trucks and buses as well as passenger cars.
In addition to TTCH, Yokohama Rubber has a winter tire test course in Sweden—the Yokohama Test Center of Sweden (YTCS). TTCH tests Yokohama Rubber’s full lineup of winter tires sold around the world, while YTCS conducts additional tests to confirm the suitability and performance of YOKOHAMA tires to be sold in continental Europe, Russia and Northern Europe.
