Tom Oare watches like a doting dad as a line of folks forms to test his latest creation.
“We’re so glad to have people finally see it,” said Oare, senior engineer in Goodyear’s Advanced Product and Process Technology department. “It has been ready for a while.”
Oare has dedicated a good part of the last two decades perfecting “it,” a project Akron-based Goodyear hopes will become up to 75 percent of its tire business by 2003.
It is the EMT, a tire that can run without air.
After a busy morning of seeing his colleagues and bosses praise the tire and explaining how it will become a major force in the world tire market, Oare is standing alone, leaning against a fence and watching his work travel around a test track.
“It’s looking good,” he said.
That’s an understatement, considering how Samir Gibara, Goodyear’s chairman and chief executive, presented the EMT to a group of media and Wall Street analysts.
“This is a bigger breakthrough than the Aquatred (rain tire),” said Gibara, adding that the rollout of the EMT is expected to surpass the successful 1991 debut of the Aquatred, which many credit with helping to turn Goodyear around.
“We are going to change the tire market with this product,” said Gibara. Last year, Goodyear’s tire sales represented $10.1 billion of the company’s $13.1 billion in revenue.
Oare downplays his role.
“Once it gets by us, we know it’s going to work mechanically and physically,” said Oare. “Whether it is a financial success is up to someone else.”
Oare has been working on bringing the run-flat tire to the average tire buyer since 1977.
“I inherited the program from someone who was changing jobs,” said Oare.
“You could see promise in it right out of the gate. The theory behind the stuff was proven a good many times.”
The main technological development in the EMT is to make sure it sticks to the wheel when the air pressure lessens or gives out. How this is done is subject to a great deal of secrecy among Goodyear officials because the proprietary technology is not patented.
“It has to lock into the wheel and require high forces to dislodge it,” said Oare. “We have to make sure there are no blowouts, that the final outcome is a gentle stop.”
Making a tire that runs without air is relatively easy, said Oare.
“You could run a car on tires made of rock,” said another Goodyear engineer. “Rocks don’t go flat. But they don’t go very fast either.”
Making a run-flat tire handle as well as one that didn’t have to run when flat is a bit harder, but not much.
The challenge lies in making a tire that runs when flat, handles well, maintains traction in wet conditions, can be produced in large quantities and does not cost an arm and a leg.
It has been only in the last year that Oare and his team of engineers and designers were able to pull all that together.
Goodyear’s major competitors, Michelin and Bridgestone/Firestone, also have run-flat tires. Michelin beat Goodyear to the punch earlier last year by rolling out its run-flat tires for a few car models.
However, Goodyear plans to make its run-flat tires available for about 75 percent of the cars on the road.
“It’s hard to push something like this on the world,” said Oare. “But people are now looking for more convenience and security. Things have changed many, many times in the past 20 years. For example, we would never have guessed that so many people would have phones in a car. It’s a natural evolution.”
Goodyear officials hope to sell the convenience and security advantages that come with the EMT this year, buoyed by changing demographics and the success the tires have had on the Chevrolet Corvette and the Plymouth Prowler this year.
“It was one thing when we got the tires on the Corvette and the Prowler. But now we are trying to fit the world,” said Oare. “There are a lot more things that have to be accounted for now. I’ve really been too busy to think and reflect about what it all means.”
The long hours and accelerated work pace aside, Oare says he isn’t consumed by his work.
By the time he reaches the family farm in Suffield Township, Ohio, where he has lived with his wife, Barbara, for 21 years, the stresses of work are essentially forgotten.
“That’s why our orchard is great,” said Oare. “It’s just a hobby farm. But it is our little piece of heaven.”
Oare said he prefers to introduce his 3-month-old grandson to the joys of picking fruit rather than engineering some new process to mechanize it.
“If I couldn’t break away from my day job, I wouldn’t do very well in it,” said Oare.
But Oare has done well in that job.
“He is very much hands-on,” said Rick Vannan, Goodyear’s director of Advanced Product and Process Technology department. “When he gets an idea, he will build it in the factory. He will try to make it work in the job shop. He likes that. He feels very responsible for this line.”
Vannan was so impressed with Oare’s work on the EMT that he nominated him for a national inventor’s award.
“Tom has so many novel ideas,” said Vannan. “He really has been the leading force behind the EMT.”
In September, Oare was honored along with several of the world’s best inventors at the Goodyear National Salute to Corporate Inventors.
The honor was nice, though it belonged to the team and not just him, said Oare. But the ceremony didn’t make him comfortable.
“It was a little awkward,” he said. “I’m not a very formal person. I just don’t feel right in a coat and tie. Give me a short-sleeve shirt and a pair of ranch jeans. That’s basically what I’ve been wearing for the last 25 years.”
Whether the EMT is a success or not, Oare plans to stick with it because he enjoys the work.
“We are trying to fill a need,” Oare said.
“When you are asked to do something, you try to do something. All the easy stuff has been done in the world. The stuff that remains has to be tackled. And with this experience, we have fewer hurdles to jump to reach our destination,” Oare said.
