Tyre labelling and retreaded tyres
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Retreaded tyres do not come under the labelling legislation yet, despite making up about 45% of the replacement truck tyre market; however, that is due for review in 2015. But there are difficulties, as Richard O'Connell of Bandvulc explains: "Each size and pattern of tyre has to be individually tested, and you're talking about up to €5,000 (£4,200) per tyre — it would probably put a lot of the SMEs in Europe out of business."
Andy Dingley of Bridgestone thinks the process might take a while: "2015 would look fairly unlikely now, I'd guess. Fuel efficiency is in large part affected by the quality of the casing, [so] it would be difficult to get consistency." Arthur Gregg of Continental says: "I think it should be applied, because it would be strange to have half your market not measured. The measures probably should be the same as for the new tyre, but I think we have to be sympathetic because it's a much more dispersed market. We have to be careful that the retreaders don't
drift too far away from the initial concept of the tyre label, making sure that we don't push good retreaders out of business."
The European retreaders' industry association BIPAVER is working on a solution; it has instigated an EU-funded €2.6m research project called RETYRE, to find "a scientifically sound and cost-effective methodology for classification of retreaded truck tyres in order to comply with future environmental performance and safety requirements".
O'Connell says: "The idea is to come up with an algorithm: you put tread depth, tread width, hardness, bed radius and so on into the computer and it comes out with figures for wet grip and rolling resistance." At the moment, the Spanish testing organisation is working on track tests to build up a database of results — among other things, it is looking at the influence of tyre casings on rolling resistance. "Hopefully by 2015 we will have a suggestion that we can put before Brussels, a way that we can protect the SME retreaders and also comply with the requirements to label retreaded tyres in line with new truck tyres," O'Connell concludes.