Goodyear Technical Center*Luxembourg (GTC*L): Tire-making Mecca

Early this year, this writer received a text message from Goodyear Philippines advertising and public relations manager Mica Ruiz. She disclosed then Goodyear’s plan to send a few motoring journalists (this writer being one among them) to Luxembourg, "for the Asian launch of Goodyear’s newest high-performance tire and a tour of the technical facilities there". Now this writer has seen his share of tire launches and though each new tire product is certainly more impressive than the previous one, what immediately went through our head was that this "technical facility" ought to be something else if Goodyear was willing to send a number of us halfway across the world just to see it.

Before the month of May ended, we did find ourselves in Luxembourg, along with a hefty contingent of motoring journalists from around the Asian region and a handful of Australians. The product to be launched was the very impressive new Eagle F1 GS-D3 (which will soon find its way to this writer’s own vehicle). And yes, the Goodyear Technical Center*Luxembourg (GTC*L) was among the other highlights of our trip.

The GTC*L has actually been operational since 1951 — although a lot has changed since then. It is located in Colmar-Berg, a province in Luxembourg rife with the necessary elements for a facility such as it to thrive — political stability, existing infrastructure, social stability, currency stability and labor availability. It was also very strategically viable for Goodyear to establish a manufacturing facility there since Eastern Europe has always had a high-growth potential for the tire market. With unprecedented growth, what was originally intended to be a tire production facility then expanded to include a research center in 1957. Today, with around 900 employees representing 24 different nationalities, the GTC*L is responsible for producing tires for Goodyear’s European, African, Asian and Australian markets.

During our visit to the GTC*L facilities, we witnessed the various steps which lead to the development of a single tire model. The painstaking process is made infinitely more efficient with the aid of state-of-the-art software and hardware, majority of which are exclusive to Goodyear. There was, for example, the Cross Laser Beam mechanism which, once inputted with the necessary data, can carve out a tire’s tread pattern with such precision, it could virtually eliminate the error-prone hand-carving method — which is still the most widely used method in the tire industry today.

The GTC*L is also home to various torturous tests which involve perforation, torsion, temperature variations and high-speed levels. Goodyear scientists also perform in-depth tire-vehicle behavior analyses in the GTC*L facilities. The most enlightening portion of our tour, at least from this writer’s perspective, had to be our visit to the Vibration Lab where we saw how tire-road noise was measured in very strictly controlled parameters. The amount of time, money, effort and human resource that went into the perfection of the lab itself made us appreciate just how much effort goes into a single aspect of a tire‘s development. It eventually made us believe in the company’s products even more, well-written press releases notwithstanding.

The GTC*L’s raison d’ étre is plain and simple. It aims to obtain Original Equipment (OE) approval on tires from almost 450 different vehicle manufacturers — which is no small feat. As a young upstart car enthusiast, this writer never thought it possible for one facility to be able to live up to such a daunting task. But after visiting the GTC*L, we were quite certain that the facility could live up to anyone‘s expectations wherever they were in the world. To say that the processes involved and the facilities that we were shown were anything less than impressive would make us liars. The GTC*L is a tire-making Mecca if there ever was one.