50 million Tyres sold in the UK each year for cars, vans, HGVs and buses
Claire Evans
claire.evans@haymarket.com
THERE ARE A whole host of new questionsto ponder when you switch from an internal combustion-engined (ICE) car to an electric one. How will you cope with the logistics ofcharging? What do you do in the event of a flat battery? Even the simple prospect of choosing replacement tyres throws up a new quandary: should you buy tyres that have been specially designed for electric vehicles (EVs), or will any tyres do the job just as well?
What makes EV tyres different?
Continental Tyres produces the tyres fittedtomany new EVs, includingthose made by BYD, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche andTesla. Thecompany’s head of technical services in the UK, Steve Howat, explains how the growth of electric car popularity has forced tyre design to rapidly evolve.
“If you think about a popular car from the 1990s, such as the Mk3 Volkswagen Golf, it weighed around 1000kg and had 14in tyres. The latest comparable model is the ID 3, which weighs around 1800kg and has 18in or larger tyres. As you can imagine, the demands bothofthesevehiclesputon their tyres are very different,” he says.