Thanks to new technology, Michelin’s Premier A/S all-season tyre is said to maintain high performance even as the tread wears down
Unlike wine, tyres don’t age well. Michelin knows this all too well, and so has incorporated some clever tricks into its new all-season tyre, the Premier A/S.
Traditionally, as the years pass and the tread wears, a tyre’s compound cures ever harder and its vee-shaped rain grooves wear to a narrower section. As a result grip levels are reduced and the tread is no longer capable of clearing the same amount of standing water as it did when new, so wet braking distances become longer.
Michelin claims it has the answer with its new Premier A/S all-season tyre, which uses construction methods already tried on the company’s range of truck tyres.
To keep the tyre compound flexible and provide consistent grip, the Premier A/S is made with high levels of silica and sunflower oils. Silica provides bonding strength and adherence to improve grip, while sunflower oil improves low-temperature grip.
Wet grip is maintained with inverted vee-shaped rain grooves on the tread, which are a bit like dovetailed joints in cross section, so that as the tyre wears the rain grooves grow. In addition, there are more than 150 additional grooves hidden in the rubber, which become exposed as the tyre wears and help to maintain the water-clearing performance.
Michelin claims a worn Premier A/S tyre has shorter wet braking distance than that of its leading rivals from Goodyear and Bridgestone when they are new. The company also boasts that wear rates and overall grip levels are undiminished.
For the moment, the Premier A/S will be offered only in the US, where all-season tyres are popular in snow states, but Michelin claims the construction materials and expanding and hidden rain grooves will be introduced on its road tyres across the world.
The Premier A/S is available in 32 sizes from 185/65 R15 to 245/45 R18 and goes on sale in the US priced from £95 ($156).
Source: The Telegraph
Published: 21 Jan 2014