Blog – July 1, 2026
In April, 2026, the California Energy Commission (CEC) announced their latest version of their proposed tire regulations. I cover that in a separate post – here!:
In this blog entry, I’m going to cover my thoughts about things not directly related to the proposed regulations.
One of the things that came out was that the CEC had created a series of categories so they could put different limits on tires appropriate for the type of tire – and 2 of those categories were “Long Life Tires” and “Ultra Long Life Tires”, with the criteria that the test results of the UTQG treadwear test would be a rating over 1,000 and 1,400 respectively.
Please note this is the test results, not what they actually put on the tire!
For reference, the current published maximum is 880 (I think!) Also note that tire manufacturers have to report a value, but they can NOT overstate the rating. They do not have to publish what they got!
This got my attention. Not only did the USTMA reveal to the CEC that such tires existed, but also they had high rolling resistance values, therefore needed special consideration.
This got me to thinking. First, technology marches forward. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that the tire manufacturers would create tread rubber compounds with better wear rates – after all, they each have a bunch of rubber chemists in the research department. I worked alongside of some of them, and there were some brilliant minds in that group!
But it also meant that the technology triangle involving treadwear, traction, and rolling resistance had expanded – and it had expanded much more than I was expecting.
That also meant that my sense of how much EV tires were different than tires for IC engines was faulty. I guess this now explains why the tire manufacturers were able to produce special tires for EV’s. I always thought those were closer in performance, and it was more a marketing thing, rather than a technology thing. How wrong I was!
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I just found out that Formula 1 made some changes to the regulations for wheels for the 2026 season. Prior to 2026, they required ALL wheels to be the same. They allowed different paint schemes, but structurally they were the same. Those wheels did not have cooling holes!
For 2026, they allowed the teams to design their own wheels – with some restrictions! The important part is that the wheels were allowed to have holes and spokes. Many of the teams made wheels with hollow spokes – which means more air volume inside the tire chamber. That means not only does the heat have more volume to heat up, but there is more cooling taking place.
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On June 17, 2026, the US Tire Manufacturers Association issued a written response to the proposed tire regulations for California. I cover the letter as part of this post:
I am so proud to be part of the industry that issues such professional responses. This is in contrast some of the written, verbal, and video responses that boil down to “I don’t like it!”.
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It took me a while to fully digest the implication that tire manufacturers were actually getting more than 1400 on their UTQG testing as revealed by the California Energy Commission’s new proposed tire regulations – and in particular their new categories of tires with different rolling resistance limits.
But first a brief history lesson;
When radial tires were first introduced and people found out they wore better than bias ply tires, there was a race between tire manufacturers to proclaim that they had the best wearing tires. At the time, the company I worked for had a “Good, Better, Best” kind of marketing system. Within the technology team, we referred to this as 20K, 30K, and 40K, with the numbers referring to how long the tires were expected to last – and the warranties reflected that! Please note that this was before the UTQG rating system was put in place.
When UTQG was mandated, some tire manufacturers saw an opportunity, and rated their tires close to what the test gave them. Over time, I saw some changes in how aggressive the tire manufacturers were in their UTQG ratings.
One of the things I noticed was that consumers were expecting that tires that offered – say – a 50,000 mile wear warranty would be rated about 500! But this resulted in an ever increasing gap between what the warranty said and what consumers actually got.
Technical: Most tire wear occurs when a vehicle corners. Driving straight ahead is practically free. That means folks who drive in the country got much better mileage than folks living in the city.
Plus it also meant that few people experienced the mileage the warranty stated. This set up a dissatisfaction with consumers.
At that time, I was working as a field test engineer and was supplying data that showed that we could actually get the wear mileages listed in the warranty. We did this by testing tires with delivery services – and the vehicles that drove between cities, rather than the vehicles that made deliveries within a given region, got those kinds of mileages.
As time went on, we did less and less and less of this kind of testing!
Fast forward to today and what transpired was that tire manufacturers took advantage of the improving technology to reduce the gap between consumer expectations and the reality – ergo, the tire manufacturers made substantial strides in getting better wearing tread compounds, while only moving the UTQG ratings and the wear warranties a little!
What surprised me was how large THAT gap had become!
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