November 04, 2009
The tire/vehicle system
Breaking down each system gives you a better understanding of how they work in tandem
By: Jacques Bajer
Manufacturers such as Ferrari epitomize the cutting edge of tire/vehicle system integration.
Tires play a vital role in vehicle operational safety. However, they have not always been viewed as products ripe for safety enhancements.
In the public’s mind, tires have reached a status of infallibility, as proven every day by the one billion of them statistically operating safely in North America. But try to tell this to those that have suffered from the consequences of tire failures, from flats to loss of traction and structural integrity!
Still, one might think that there is no need for major tire innovations today, when in reality there is. Some of us who witnessed the original introduction of radial-ply tires by Michelin in France in 1948 and are still around have a different view of the product: its design, its methods of manufacture and its validation procedures for a particular vehicle application.
From June 2008 to March 2009, Modern Tire Dealer published a series of articles I wrote, which covered the following vital tire performance criteria:
• tire structural integrity,
• tire tread wear resistance,
• tire traction and
• tire power wastage.
The logical conclusion to my tire series focuses on the vehicle and its effects on tire performance and vice-versa.
Historical background
Many years ago, while working at Ford Motor Co. (1955-1970), I observed that tires were not that well understood by my colleagues, nor by Ford’s management, to the level that they should have been, considering the critical role they play in vehicle operations.
At the time, tire engineering product acceptance specifications were limited and applied only to bias-ply tires, then still universally used in the United States. During an informal conversation I had with my chief engineer, I stressed the point that “in my view, nothing affects the operational economics and behavior of a vehicle more, one way or the other, than the type and quality of the tires Ford selects for its vehicles as original equipment, and that, among many other factors, insufficient tire manufacturing precision and uniformity can have detrimental effects on vehicle operation, from the operating smoothness and other standpoints.”
Therefore, I strongly recommended that Ford take tires very seriously, and start to develop technologically-based tire/wheel/valve system specifications and validation testing procedures.
This was conveyed to Ford’s top management, including Robert McNamara, one of the 10 whiz-kids, as they became known, hired by Henry Ford II in 1946 to map out Ford’s peacetime business strategy following World War II.
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