Supercharging the Future of Mobility with Chris Helsel, CTO at Goodyear

And so that quickly gets us into putting a sensor in the tire, and that sensor has the ability to monitor temperature, pressure, accelerations and give us some different information as to what's happening at that contact.

So, first off, I would point back to some of Goodyear's heritage. We did have some of the first tires on the moon as part of the original Apollo missions. And in fact, there's out for consideration — I don't think it's public knowledge — that the return of the boom mission... I think it's the fundamental... The sake is it turned Artemis? Yes, correct. And so there are a lot of companies out there forming these partnerships with us. We had an announcement about the collaboration we're doing with GM and Lockheed, and our contributions to that would be the idea of tires or a tire-type structure — something to connect the vehicle to the ground. That's what we specialize in: connect vehicles to ground, pass all the forces, and do it efficiently, giving traction. But when we think of this, it's not a tire like you would understand normally, where you're putting air in it. It's more like what has shown up before on the internet — they're almost like wire meshings, very advanced alloys, and they give you the ability to sink down into the moon dust, but yet once they get in there, they can start providing traction. The dust will actually be floating through this mesh of the tire while it's moving and rolling the vehicle. It's kind of like a mining application: they can really dictate the amount of materials they can move and how fast they can move them based on the tire's durability — it's kind of the rev limiter. It's a similar challenge: if you want to move things around on the moon under these really advanced conditions, a lot of this thinking is you're going to do it on the dark side of the moon — no Pink Floyd reference intended. And it's a much harsher environment in terms of coldness and temperature, so it's a real challenge. So yes, we are working on this to enable those next generation of vehicles.

I'm not sure if I'm going to sign up for that, but theoretically I could, I guess. I don't know.

Yeah, he says he has a really strong succession plan for me, right?

I had not, no.

Yeah, it's very impressive. When you think about it and what's going to be possible, it's actually starting to happen, and it's exciting. That spirit of innovation gives you the optimistic view of the future and probably what made me become a CTO, getting into the technology, being able to solve problems.

Interestingly, neither were college educated — I was first generation. But my dad was very mechanical, so I was always working on cars and things with him. I think as much as anything else, he wanted somebody who could still crawl underneath the car and loosen up the oil pan. But the bottom line is, you get into that and you like doing it, and that's what took me into mechanical engineering. At the heart, it really was the problem solving. Problem solving, to me, leans to a bit of that optimism, especially when connected with a lot of inquisitiveness. I was probably raised to be really inquisitive — I was the youngest of four, and it was a lot of 'Why is that?,' and then just go try it. I was always very experimental. That inquisitiveness gives you the optimism. And he made a reference: I thought it was always impressive when you hear about some of the things a company like Tesla is doing — a different question, which is, 'What would have to be true to be able to do that?' That leads to a very proactive 'Well, we would just have to do this and this. Okay, well let's go solve.' That inquisitiveness leads to wanting to move forward, be proactive, come up with new things, and that's what really gets me excited, gets me up in the morning.

So, it's very interesting: they all became business people. One tried engineering and said, 'Boy, this is a lot of work.' Not saying business people aren't about work, but he said, 'I want to have more fun at college.' But they're a bit more on the social side, so sales, consulting — those are the things they've gotten into.

Well, that's a great combination. There are probably stories about the engineer getting the cheerleader, so you're out there in the tail of the distribution of statistics.

It really comes from us thinking about what is the core thing we do. At the heart, we connect vehicles to the ground. We could say we're a tire manufacturer and sell tires, and that's very true — we've done that proudly for 125 years, and as of right now, there's no better way to do that. But we've done that traditionally with physics and chemistry — very traditional sciences. Now, with the immersion of the Internet of Things, we start saying, 'Couldn't we do that with some of these new technologies?' And so that quickly gets us into putting a sensor in the tire, and that sensor has the ability to monitor temperature, pressure, accelerations, and give us some different information as to what's happening at that contact. Now, what can we do with that? One thing: we could help you be very efficient in moving things for fleets — we could help you prevent a downtime incident because we're real-time monitoring: is that tire up to the job to be done, properly inflated, how much wear is left? We're able to do those things when we combine those signals with our knowledge through algorithms and interacting with somebody who can take action. Secondly, we've done demonstrations of just knowing the tire and how worn it is, recovering lost stopping distance — think of that as a safety feature. Yes, we provide some enabling to braking systems today because of the type of rubbers we pick, but now we do that in a whole different way by telling you digitally information about the tires. That's caused us to think about new things we could do, new ways to build a form and get a job done for a long time, and connect with others to bring whole new products to market or bring them to market ourselves.

Before the end of this year, our first OE fitment will be on market. As the original equipment manufacturer, I can't name them, but their vehicle will have those smart tires in there. Think of it as a new way they can unlock new features — knowing if it's a summer tire, winter tire, or all-season tire, you could change the characteristics of some of these control systems.

Number one, clearly we're creating IP. But probably more importantly, we are talking about it. We're doing releases as we're doing these pilots. We've been laying breadcrumbs out there — through interviews like this, the CEO will do the same. We've been talking about these probably since about 2020. January 2020 we had a big coming out. Of course, COVID kind of turned a lot of things around, but we've continued this work and laying out examples. Another one: Gatik, a middle-mile delivery company. They started out working with Walmart, do groceries in Canada, Georgia Pacific — we've been doing work with them to put these sensors in. For autonomous driving, you have a digital feedback for things you used to do as a driver. We gave them real-time friction prediction at CES this past year, using local APIs connecting into weather to give you friction you can expect based on the tire and its condition. We'll start working to hardcore integrate that into the driving system. We keep laying out nuggets at these announcements.

Yes, it's a strategic fund. We're investing in folks who are driving mobility. You said, 'Why do we call ourselves a mobility company?' You've got to get around those stock leaders, and those people are really doing something different. So oftentimes with our investments, there's some agreement around strategic work we can do together.

I'd put it this way: that's probably not getting the highest amount of current investment on the road now, so we'll say winter 2040.

You're referring to non-pneumatic concepts. It has a big challenge. We did some experimentation with that same segment with Bad Boy mowers, were in market with them. The pneumatic tire was really invented in the 1800s. Why has it been the structure we build upon? Because air is cheap — there aren't a lot of materials as cheap as air. As soon as you have to carry the load with a real material, you add significant cost. That's the challenge. But at the same time, with autonomous driving, there are some killer apps that could more than justify that material. For example, if one of the last things holding back full autonomous driving is the edge case around rapid air loss in a pneumatic tire, come up with an architecture that could never have rapid air loss. Autonomy: when you think of flying, there's lots of redundancy; there's not redundancy in a tire. So you could make them bulletproof. If you're taking out an $80,000 driver on a truck, you'd be more than willing to pay a few hundred more dollars for that extra material in the tire. These things have a challenge competing on traditional attributes like tread wear, rolling resistance, traction, but when we move to these new mobility modes, that's where you have the opportunity to use these new architectures to solve problems.

It's a little crazy. I'm not only the chief technology officer but also responsible for our global operations — manufacturing, procurement, quality, safety, plant optimization. How does that go together with the technology role? My technology role breaks into traditional tire technology, which has a huge interaction with product and process. How you make and mix rubber really dictates how it will perform. The traditional tire technology and manufacturing strongly blend if you want to make step changes. That's the logic of putting them together. But then I have this whole area of digital and new business models. So my day is filled working between three buckets: very traditional things like cost to manufacture, safety programs; the next meeting might be about the release of the next all-terrain tire; the meeting after that might be about the new business model for the intelligent tire. My day goes all over, plus running day-to-day budgets and people. It's a fun day with lots of variety.

Like any leader, you've got to have a great staff. I've got more than a dozen folks who help run the day-to-day. I'm making sure things are getting in their way, helping them put together direction. Management really comes down to three things: make sure you have a direction, make sure you have a process to know if you're on track or need to pivot, and get the right people on the bus. You constantly cycle through those.

I was a real business book junkie. Super bright people have written so many, but they tend to pull on one thread of a few fundamental ideas. At the core, it's those three things. You go back to Andrew Grove's 'High Output Management' — there are some real fundamentals everybody's built off. With my job jar, I just pound fundamentals. You can't go wrong doing that, like the basic principles of our lives.

First, Tesla is a fantastic customer, so we'd be silly not to understand our customer and their leadership. It's impressive to see somebody come in and do things differently, ask different questions. I picked up that item about asking a different question: 'What would have to be true?' instead of 'Why won't this work?' That kind of changed things. When we see people stretch and break paradigms, we ought to try to understand how they got people to work differently. We organized some of our operations and technology around something called bold goals, which came from looking at how other people got organizations to step out. It wasn't Elon Musk — it was from Procter & Gamble and 'Playing to Win,' step one: aspirations. As a leader, you think that's obvious, but we weren't doing it. Now we have 11 bold goals that we use as our North Stars. Every year in annual operating planning, we ask: are we on track, what do we need to do this year, and we have a monthly cadence to discuss. Each member of my staff owns one of them. So we're inspired by someone like Elon Musk, but you can find that inspiration from others too. The key is you've got to do something with it.

No, I've never gotten the honor to meet personally.

Yes, for sure. We've got a couple of lines specifically named for electric vehicles. More importantly, there are new challenges: additional weight, providing the same treadwear. People equate that to torque, but it's really about driving with more weight. Secondly, because you don't have engine noise, there are more challenges around quietness. We've done innovations like putting strips of foam on the back side of the tread to absorb drum resonance. Third, range anxiety and delivering great rolling resistance. With rubber, as you pull on it and release, it doesn't follow the same stress curve as metals — that energy loss is called hysteresis. Every time a tire rolls, there's energy loss due to rubber properties. So we have challenges delivering tread wear, even more rolling resistance, and quietness. Beyond that, there's focus on lightweight architectures because you have to accelerate and decelerate, and heavier load carrying capability. These form new engineering trade-offs and opportunities for innovation.

Various segments. We've named customers like Tesla and General Motors — original equipment manufacturers buy lots of tires. They tend to stretch performance requirements, putting in new power plants like electric vehicles. That's a great place for us to be, not only selling lots of tires but being on the edge of what's new. A big part of the business is replacement, sold through different channels — our own distribution, where recommendations are made at the counter. On the commercial side, fleets are an emerging trend with rideshare. We have huge mega-fleets, do a lot of commercial truck business — I ran our retread business at one time. Big fleets like Schneider Trucking, UPS — they use lots of tires. The post office, too. With COVID, the shared economy is coming back. If people don't have personal car ownership, the consumer tire industry moves into fleets. But predominantly, it's individual car ownership. Autonomy might flip it because the cost of a vehicle has to incorporate the driver system. We're well positioned whether selling to OEMs, individuals, or fleets.

You could say, 'On your current truck, how many are new tires or how many are retreads?' By and large, about two-thirds of a big fleet's tires at any given time are retreaded, not brand new. To retread a tire: bring in the tire after the tread is worn down. Commercial truck tires are designed to be retreaded two or three times. A brand new tire on the steer position of an 18-wheeler wears down at about 150,000 miles. We take the whole rim assembly, break it down at a retread factory, clean and paint the wheel. The tire goes to inspection for injuries like nails — if so, they require repair. Then you buff off the old rubber, put on some uncured rubber, which hardens under heat and pressure. We pre-make a tread piece — it could be a ring (our unicircle technology) that gets stretched over that uncured rubber. Then into a large chamber, pull a vacuum, apply heat and pressure, and out comes essentially a glued-on new tread. You recover over 90% of the mass of the tire, so it's a great sustainability play.

You've got next Thanksgiving's dinner conversation.

Well, it's been a fun conversation. Number one, keep airing your tires — they'll last longer, which is great for the environment. Even though it might seem crazy because I could sell more, it's the right thing. If you keep them properly aired, they function at their best — better fuel economy, better tread wear, fewer durability challenges. Second, when making choices on tires, don't be tempted by super low prices. If you step back and balance safety, sustainability, and long-term performance, paying a little more for a high-quality product will last longer. It's like clothing: don't buy disposable; buy something nicer, hold on to it longer, even get it repaired. Think of Goodyear that way. Lastly, we're a 125-year company trying to transform into a mobility company. Watch out for those cool new innovations like intelligence. You never would have put chips in your refrigerator, but it happened. It's here and coming, and we're excited about making people safer and more efficient.