New Michelin UHP Pilot Sport A/S 3 Fills Niche for Some ON Drivers

Michelin North America recently showed off its latest addition to the Pilot passenger tire family - the Michelin Pilot Sport A/S 3. Due for full release in May of this year, the all-weather, all-season tire will be produced in a wide range of 65 sizes. The Pilot Sport A/S 3 is intended to be an ideal blend of performance and practicality. According to Michelin, “This tire is ideal for someone who wants to optimize the performance of his or her vehicle and drive with confidence year-round.”

Technology is breakthrough, state of the art with this tire, incorporating Michelin’s Variable Contact Patch 2.0 technology which can roughly be translated as sticks-like-glue-in-the-dry. What’s also unique is the tire’s aggressive asymmetric tread pattern, given that the tire is an all season. This tread pattern is a take-off from the Pilot Super Sport, Michelin's Max Performance Summer tire fitted to sophisticated cars like the Ferrari. This design is said to keep the road noise to a minimum and to put more rubber on the road for superior handling and control.

The Pilot Sport A/S 3 boasts “extreme” levels of silica in the tread compound along with Variable Thickness Sipes and large circumferential grooves in order to attain fantastic wet grip and fight hydroplaning. Michelin’s sunflower oil-derived Helio Compound combines with its unique siping and biting edges in the tread grooves to master cold weather mobility.

Conceived and created in North America, the Michelin Pilot Sport A/S 3 will also be manufactured in North America and will be backed by the Michelin Promise Plan.

Tire Retailers in ON to be Selling Dunlop Sport 5000’s to Mazda Owners

Dunlop Tires has been known historically as one of the big UK tire manufacturers. Since 1985 there has been a shuffling of ownership and rights but at this point Dunlop Tires is an American company owned by Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. Goodyear sells the Dunlop brand in North America, Australia and Europe.

Recently Dunlop Tires revealed that the new 2014 Mazda 6 sedan will be riding on Dunlop SP Sport 5000 radials. The SP Sport 5000 is an ultra-high performance (UHP) all-season tire with the following features:

• Innovative, asymmetrical tread design provides a balance of wet and dry performance
• Large, stable, interconnected tread blocks enhances dry cornering, grip and stability
• Independent inner tread blocks with open shoulder grooves result in powerful water dispersion and all-season grip
• Full-width, twin-cut steel belts designed for ride uniformity and excellent footprint shape
• Exclusive, high-performance, all-season tread compound  assures enhanced grip, control, energy absorption and tread wear in a wide range of driving conditions
• Max Flange Shield helps protect rims from accidental curb damage
• Jointless Band Technology™ maintains the tire's shape and enables smooth performance at highway speeds

The 2014 Mazda 6 sedan is slated to hit the market early in 2013 and will roll out on size P225/45R19.

Upstart Brand Toyo Tires Making Inroads in ON

Many drivers in our province are not very familiar with the brand Toyo Tires but this tire company has built a solid reputation in Canada and around the world. 

If you happen to live in the Toronto GTA area, which includes Oshawa, Whitby, Pickering and Ajax, you are much more likely to have run across the brand at some point or another simply because of the increased number of vehicles fitted with the Toyo brand.

Toyo has been making inroads for many years in the Canadian market and is probably best known for its Open Country tire for Off Road enthusiasts. Actually, Toyo has had an official presence in Canada for nearly 30 years but the majority of its operations are in the US, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Oceania, having started business over 65 years ago.

In North America, tire dealers have voted Toyo Tires as the number one overall brand on several occasions. (I recently blogged about the 2012 Tire Brand Study.) According to Toyo themselves, “our consumer tires have been voted #1 Overall Brand by North American tire dealers an unprecedented seven times since 2000.”

Very recently, Toyo Tire U.S.A. announced its all-season A24 had been selected as OE (original equipment) tire on the fully redesigned 2013 Mitsubishi Outlander Sport crossover. Becoming OE supplier for new vehicles is a great way to get established in the marketplace and because this is the first OE Mitsubishi fitment in the U.S. and Canada for Toyo, it means more penetration and a brighter future.

Mitsubishi’s most popular model is the Outlander Sport and all trim levels of the 2013 Outlander Sport come standard with all season Toyo A24 tires, size P225/55R18, on 18-inch aluminum wheels. Apparently the great fuel economy of the Outlander (31 mpg) is due partly to the hi tech design of the A24 tire, even though it boasts a 148-hp, 2.0-liter MIVEC engine.

The most popular consumer product lines for the Toyo brand are Proxes (for high performance passenger cars, light trucks and race cars), Open Country (for light trucks and SUVs), Versado (for luxury passenger cars), and Extensa (high value tire for passenger cars and minivans). Many of the tires are built in the United States at their state-of-the-art factory in Bartow County, Georgia.