Sustainable Tires: Innovations Don’t Need to Be Flashy to Be Impressive

Innovations in technology tend to shake up everything. Think about how smartphones changed the way we interact with each other, and how we have trouble living without them now, or about how watching a TV series has changed from “appointment television” (with ads) to a once-a-year binge on our streaming platform of choice. When it comes to transportation, the move to an electric mode of mobility promises to not only significantly clean up transportation sector emissions but also fundamentally change our driving and refueling habits. But there will be other, less noticeable shifts as well. We think about progress, especially toward sustainability goals, in a life-changing way, but that doesn’t have to always be the case—and it doesn’t mean that progress isn’t just as impressive.

Take tires, for instance—an underappreciated component of vehicles. At Michelin’s March 2024 Sustainability Summit, the company showed off its newest tire tech. Michelin and other manufacturers are trying to update tires for the electric age, and the company’s new rolling stock is ready for the high torque and increased weight that will accompany the global shift to electric mobility. Michelin has also set ambitious sustainability goals, including 100% sustainable materials for its tires by 2050, with sustainable materials defined strictly as a resource that is renewable in a human lifespan. For example, silica won’t be derived from sand, despite it being a theoretically renewable resource, but instead from rice, because rice is renewable on a much faster timeline. These strict sustainable goals are notable in a marketplace full of companies greenwashing their products, moving the goalpost for what a “sustainable” material means to them.

At the Sustainability Summit, I test-drove an internal combustion engine-powered Ford Explorer equipped with tires made with up to 45% sustainable materials. This was part of a media program where journalists were sampling high performance rubber on EVs from Porsche and Mercedes-Benz. While those drives might have been exceptional, the drive in the Ford Explorer was not. I floored the throttle, slammed on the brakes, took sharp turns, and drove completely outside the realm of my typical, safe, boring driving style. And I didn’t notice a thing about the tires.

In the days since, that test-drive stuck out to me more than any other time I spent behind the wheel in the past year, precisely because it was so unremarkable. By weight, nearly half the materials in the tires were of sustainable origin. The value chain for their production is radically different from the way tires have been manufactured for over a century, reflecting how Michelin’s goals have shifted. The company says its main priority in changing the sustainable makeup of its tires is to match performance metrics exactly—metrics like rolling resistance, longevity, and braking performance that are critical to vehicle efficiency and safety. In a world of flashy innovations, this one is notable because the new product felt the same.

Michelin says its goal is not to have a line of tires made with sustainable materials and a line of “traditional” tires, but to adjust the makeup of all its tires at once. Customers will buy tires in the same way as before, drive as they normally do, and might not ever know that their tires are made of completely different materials. In a word, the tire experience is boring. In this case, boring is exactly what it should strive to be.