Labelling tyres made for Kenya

By Tony Ngare

Just recently, the European Union reached a deal where it was agreed to label tyres according to their energy sufficiency, wet grip and noise impact.

This decision was taken to reduce tyres’ rolling resistance. This would cut vehicles’ fuel consumption, reduce the EU’s reliance on costly oil imports and cut emissions of greenhouse gases in the fight against climate change.

From 2012, tyre retailers will have to display ratings ranging from A to G for wet grip and efficiency represented by logos showing a rain cloud and a fuel pump. A logo showing a loudspeaker on a tyre will rate the rolling noise in decibels.

All this got me thinking. Suppose we had tyres made for Kenya as a popular footwear brand boasts? What signs would we need to incorporate on the tyre?

National phenomenon

Potholes are a national phenomenon and, therefore, any tyre manufacturer who expects to smile all the way to the bank, must find ways to have tyres that are potholes friendly. How would pothole friendly tyres look? I wish I knew but I am not a big shot CEO paid a seven-figure salary to manage a tyre plant!

However, I do know that tyre manufacturers need to invest strongly in their research and development to have pavement friendly tyres. We all know how crazy traffic can sometimes get in some cities. To avoid such hassles, it becomes necessary to navigate your motor vehicle on pavements and over flowerbeds in order to do all that important but illegal U-turn. Special tyres are needed for this purpose.

Crazy diversions

Of course once in a while, in the course of your driving, you will encounter road diversions. I don’t know why the diversions almost always take the worst routes. If you rarely get off the tarmac, you will find some of the diversions a challenge.

For one, the amount of dust could make both you and the car cough to a complete halt. If not, you could get stuck in the fine soil just as easily as you could get stuck in mud. So we would expect the tyre makers to come up with tyre surfaces that effortlessly gnaw at soil as if it were a mass of black forest cake.

A popular tagline in a tyre advert says ‘power without control is nothing’. This is the stuff that the wisdom of the sages is made of. Why would one brag of driving a big car if the tyres below the behemoth are of suspect quality? Likewise, consumers would expect manufacturers here to truthfully state the reliability levels of tyres when it comes to wet surfaces. We have been many times and severely warned that the El Nino rains are around the corner.

It’s all in the tyre

Therefore, it is reasonable to expect a tyre retailer to tell you: "Take this tyre, my friend. This one is very good with rains. But if you want a cheap one I (will) give at half the price of the good one. And I hope to see you again here . . . not in the obituaries!"

Frequent punctures are a pain in all the wrong places for a motorist. As such, it would be expected that the new high quality standardisation measures also ensure that tyre makers indicate on the tyre how long you could expect to drive puncture-free. It would be some sort of a guarantee.

It would take a lot of integrity for the tyre manufacturers to put all that information visibly on the tyre’s outer surface. One wonders if after putting all the symbols on the tyre, the manufacturer would have any space remaining on the tyre to scribble its name.

—tonyngare@standardmedia.co.ke