The *Real* Range Anxiety?! How can wheels really boost battery EVs?!

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1:39Hello and welcome to another episode of the Everything Electric podcast where today we are talking about tires and more specifically how thinking a little more sensibly about your tires could mean that you could go further more quietly and more safely in your electric vehicle now this is such an enjoyable conversation it's actually been a few hours since i finished the conversation with neil barrett who is the ev lead at hancock um and i had a right old lovely time and i really hope that you do too and come away with a few more tire facts up your sleeves um so all of that to come but first a very quick advert break our three free YouTube channels on EVs and clean energy tech are funded by our fun-packed test-drive-tastic events in the North, West and Greater London and our events down under.

2:28Next up, Everything Electric Sydney 2026. Plus, check out everythingelectric.store for merch and much more. Neil, thank you so much for giving up your afternoon to come and speak with me today. My pleasure. Well, it's an absolute total delight to talk about all things tyre related today. Excellent. And I suppose we should reassure the audience who might be thinking, hmm, is this going to be that interesting? That yes, it is going to be interesting because I know you have many a tyre fact. Indeed. And I've spent a lifetime accruing them. So hopefully one or two will be interesting. It can be dry.

3:08It can be technical. We'll keep it as light as we can. but we're going to have to dive in deep on a few bits I imagine. We are there's going to be some stuff for everyone some stuff for the nerds yeah some stuff for people who you know are yet to be convinced that this is the podcast for them we'll see where we end up. Okay great. Well but before we get into it can you tell us a little bit about yourself and specifically what you do at Hankook? Okay so well I'm Neil I'm EV lead and key account manager at Hankook so I've been with them I'm in my 12th year now so that was quick um and really my role within this apart from my key account manager role is to i guess be the sort of ev tire guru um you know we're training uh you know i monitor trends try and help out and inform people what's going on in the market what sizes are growing i mean there's a new size every week we've got to keep our eye on you know make sure we make it make sure we got them make sure we've developed it more importantly and sort of general spokesman on it really so um I guess I was in the right room at the right time I guess for for all the EV and I just am fascinated by EVs and I think that is something that we're going to get into in this podcast that actually when it comes to EVs the opportunities for tyres to do something slightly different and to aid performance gains is actually really huge um but before we before we get into that i wonder when you when you chat to your friends and family and say what you do do you have a favorite tire fact that you whip out from your rear pocket do i have a favorite tire fact i've got a new tire fact actually i don't ask me to remember what i said to my friends and family about tires i mean i mean i've been doing it long enough um 23 years more to the point but uh here's an interesting one i think it's interesting but did you know thanks to evs cars can now accelerate faster than they can brake wow never happened that's never happened before no no not that i can find i'm sure someone can delve deep into the archives of some information somewhere but generally as a rule it was always assumed that cars could not accelerate faster that they can break because it was never needed.

5:36That is absolutely fascinating. And this is the power of people being able to comment below. If anyone wants to contend this fact, please do. Please quote your sources in those comments as well. But how interesting. I'm trying to think about when I run, do I accelerate quicker than I slow down? I'm not sure the answer to that, I have to say. I think it's to do with the physics and the technical prowess of the tyres. And when they've done calculations about how fast cars can accelerate, generally speaking, it's never even been near. Because ICEs just cannot put down their power quickly. Well, they can't really.

6:20if you can imagine, they're not really producing their power until they're revving to 2 ,000 revs or, you know, in a fast start, maybe 3 ,000 revs and there's wheel spin. But EVs are so efficient. They do take a toll. It's indicative of the toll the tyres take on an EV. I think that's not really why I said it, but now I say it, it is. I mean, it's a perfect example of, you know, the stresses and strains they have to deal with and why we have to think about them differently, I'd imagine. Well, I think you've allowed us to segue perfectly into our next bit of this conversation, which is when it comes to electric vehicles, why is it that we need to think about the tyres slightly differently?

6:59I think if we look at it in the round, if you want to pick out two points, it's the rapid increase in power versus the need for efficiency. And presumably those are two conflicting requirements. generally they were accepted that they were so tyres have developed hugely in the last well we can say 100 years it's the same technology really in in in shape you know in its rubber it's mounted to a steel or alloy wheel but but yes it's um it's always been assumed that to have the grip and traction you required for a high power you have to trade off efficiency and and that's just simply not acceptable with evs just just can't happen i mean in some rare cases very high performance evs they allow it and i think customers accept that that's a trade-off but you know we're not talking about high performance cars per se we're not talking about cars that people buy for high performance we're talking about family cars that are designed to carry five people with over 500 horsepower yeah you know i mean that's where we are that's the reality of it so from a technical standpoint it's a challenge it's a real challenge i mean we've never been in this situation before so when we're asked the question why do they need a different approach to the sort of design of tires then really those those two bits do summarize it quite nicely so the implication being that we still need that high efficiency but the performance of evs is such that they're putting greater stress on those tires which presumably means a faster wear rate if you were to just use standard tires on electric vehicle yeah i mean in essence there's a number of things that affect wear um power and weight and these are all things i'm sure we'll touch on when we talk about characteristics of ev but obviously if you've got a vehicle that's got 500 horsepower and weighs two and a half ton it will unchecked wear tires quicker than a vehicle that has less power and less weight that's just that's just a real fact but obviously knowing those and knowing that those um sort of design parameters need to be baked in at the beginning um it allows us really to go to town with the individual technical elements that we've gone into with the Hankuk I on.

9:33Okay so presumably for a company like Hankuk who is like well every every car needs four wheels at least or four tires yeah absolutely and the direction of travel is towards electric vehicles that you know poses an enormous opportunity to innovate something slightly differently so what is Hankuk's approach and And I suppose sub-bullet to that question is, what are the specific characteristics of EVs that require that slightly different approach? Okay, so the initial approach or the approach we've taken to market is we've brought out an EV-specific tyre, a sub-brand. It's called ION. It's available in a number of patterns.

10:14We can go into the individuals. But in terms of what we're looking at, the main factors that influence tyre, performance, wear, rolling resistance, etc. So you're talking about the weight of the vehicle. So when we talk about weight, we're not talking about a static weight. We're talking about a dynamic weight. Weight transfer under braking, under cornering, okay, it causes massive loads on the tyres. So we've got to develop tyres to be able to accept that. 50 % of the noise in the cabin of an EV comes from the tyres. 50 % and that's because it's no longer able to hide behind the sound of exactly what it does and we filtered it out you know I mean even you know even luxury cars I mean luxury cars they got a lot of soundproof you know sound deadening materials and everything else but even luxury cars they cancel out frequencies that the tyres would have normally sort of produced so therefore you you go it's going to be more noticeable it's going to be the main sort of noise point in the car.

11:24Yeah, exactly, you know. So these, again, but in that, we have to factor in the requirement for a low rolling resistance. And for those who might not be familiar with low rolling resistance, can you just define what that means? In its easiest form, it is energy wasted as heat. so as a tyre rolls down the road as it as the you know from a molecular level as the molecules sort of move around within themselves from the tread area from the sidewalls from the shoulder area it will try to produce it will naturally create heat there will be there'll be sort of friction within that um interestingly it's something we can talk about with evs because or at least a a theme that will repeat itself which is they are the victims of their own success in this because evs generally use 25 their energy just to make the tires roll yeah that's across the board at lower speeds it's higher and really at higher speeds then aerodynamics comes in and you know makes that but as a general rule 25 of all the energy in your battery is just there to make the tires roll so that's a big window to go out isn't it you know that's that there's a lot of improvement to be made on that so and so all those tie in there obviously with the weight has an effect on um wear and obviously the the thing we alluded to earlier is the sheer power and torque that they actually produce so that's an interesting thing because we have on the one hand a huge amount of power that evs are capable of creating from a sort of standing start yeah which in a way you're like well rolling resistance or low rolling resistance may not be such a problem compared to say an internal combustion engine vehicle that's got like a slightly slower start for example it's sort of there's less energy in that exact process but then also you want to have a low rolling resistance but you can't necessarily sacrifice grip and then you want to have an efficiency but you also have potentially a higher wear rate so you need to sort of compromise those so all of these things feel like a very challenging set of conflicting requirements for an engineer they are and um i mean when we when we came to design the ion um it wasn't just a case of just trying to put all these things we've learned over the years we literally had to redesign a process of making it and new materials so there was 58 patents that we registered during the design of the ion range so i mean that's extraordinary and it does allow you to say that you've almost reinvented the wheel it does i will allow you to say that but yeah i mean certainly we've we've really pushed the limits of where the tires can go and it's interesting because a lot of people just assumed that you know back in the day when you needed grip you needed heat i think everyone sort of was sort of comfortable with that as an understanding of it and what we're saying is one of the the big improvements in tires over the last few years all of them is the lack of requirement for heat to produce grip and that comes down to the compounds we now use which are unrecognizable for 15 years ago.

14:54Absolutely unrecognizable. And I think the way I'd like to think about it now is if, do you remember the old light bulbs, the old filament light bulbs? Yeah. I mean, it must be 20 years ago since we've seen them, or they've banned. Yeah. But they produce 90 % heat and 10 % light. Yeah. New LED bulbs produce 90 % light and 10 % heat. We all accept that. We know we can touch a light bulb now, and it doesn't burn ourselves. You know, it won't burn our hands. so we know that progress has been made in this it all sort of fits into the whole idea of reducing energy consumption in everything we do so so yeah it is it is really a huge focus on this and and the way we've gone about it in terms of how we've just re i mean of that 58 patents 15 were just for the compound.

15:43So this is, we've done some remarkable sort of improvements in pushing the boundaries and trying to minimize this trade-off that people think is always there. But, you know, and the thing is, EVs, because they're so efficient, are huge beneficiaries of this technology. Because there's that 25 % that you can go after, actually, if you can innovate. Yeah. then you can create huge amounts of gains well absolutely and and people tend to gravitate towards evs because of their efficiency and their and their running costs i mean we've got the figures now we kind of know that ice are 18 to 25 percent efficient and evs are somewhere approaching 90 percent efficient i think it's 87 percent efficient is the latest figures i got because they regen because they don't produce the heat that you know ice is produced because they're just generally so well integrated and so logical is the honest answer so yeah so if something is very efficient if something is efficient at its core then you can trip it up quite easily by forgetting the details and one of those would be tires so i have so many questions and i want to make sure that i remember all of them i'll try and answer all of them but i guess beyond the material innovation and really working on those compounds of which there are many patents are attributed to that of the 58 yeah are there any other innovations that you're like oh this one's a good one there's quite a lot i i i quite like well the way we've gone to town with the noise it's that that's really quite clever so we've we've developed a suite of technologies i extreme Lightness, iSupermileage, iSoundabsorber, iPerfectRip.

17:31So what these are, a suite of technologies that allow us to deal with each individual element of the EV and the challenges it gives. And certainly if we look at iExtreme Lightness, which falls under rolling resistance, I mean, there's a lot to be going with that, and a lot of them cross over. But what I do like when we go to the iSoundabsorber, there's five individual technologies there we've applied and one of them that I love which is so simple really is the way we've just designed the the inside of the tread area the circumferential grooves there's there's some really interesting sort of shapes a sort of a sort of knurling shapes around them and that makes a hell of a difference about three decibels really or three percent of the decibels it's It's amazing.

18:22And one thing won't do it, but as a suite of technologies, it's remarkable. Even just the technology has gone into the tread to make it quieter as it rolls down the road. It seems perfectly logical. But that links in with every single other one of the technologies that we've gone into on this one. So, I mean, whether we want to go into depth on those, we can, but, you know. well so the one that when i was reading the um the material about the iron range there's one that really struck me which was around um and i think this is all to do with creating more grip both wet grip and dry grip and typically when a tire rolls the sort of the sipes they kind of it's almost like stacking bananas in shape so the 3d sipes that's it yeah yeah yeah but what iron is doing is they instead of sort of stacking bananas which you know inherently if you can imagine stacking bananas they'd have lots of space between them this is more like stacking lego bricks so they sort of lock together in order to create that grip which i thought was very cool well not only does it create the grip but it stops the movement in the tread area itself so the actual vibration is reduced which reduces the the production of heat which reduces the rolling resistance so it's there are at least two or three different upsides to that technology so I guess this is you know a podcast and it's not potentially a visual medium but but yeah I mean it's rather than just a straight line it goes in little blocks and so when they're under pressure for example under cornering they solidify together and it's it's just a lovely clever just one of many things we've done we've I think we brought that out originally on truck tires this 3d printing and it allowed the the tread to change as it wears down and and then all of a sudden we think well hang on this has got so many other different applications um i'm sure it was designed within it as well what i love about all of this is that when you feel that these things come together and you see you know on a table or a presentation oh this creates sort of a three percent gain and this creates a two percent gain or whatever and then you sort of take a step back and like this was someone's job to engineer these things and I just think that's extraordinary and it's just so life-affirming I suppose there are people out there chasing those gains to push the envelope that little bit further I mean the truth is it was in terms of engineers probably hundreds of people's jobs you know and and they have to be managed and brought together working for the same thing and so many different ideas so many applications of of technology that we we've you know developed and in this case invented now I don't know if any are you aware I'm going to ask you now do you know what a tire is made where a tire is made sorry how a tire is made no I don't actually it's it's kind of odd so it goes down a production line and and it's it's put together a lot of people involved a lot of machines and sort of various rubbers are adhered to each other and and it's sort of glued into the bead glue at this point and it comes off and it you look at it you think that sorry it doesn't look like a tire it looks like a beach ball with a hole in it and then it goes into the cure it goes into the mold but it's cured so and this depending on the size of tires cured for 10 to 20 minutes and that's where all the magic happens that's where all the the uh the rubbers cure to point vulcanization and all that sort of technical wonderful stuff the thing is there was always a problem with that when you make a tire that's got different thicknesses if you looked at a sort of cross section of a tire you think well the tread's quite thick and then you need a bit more reinforcement you know just right at the edge of the tread where it goes into the side wall and the side wall you want thin problem is you'd have a always have this trade-off really of what's going to be cured right what's going to be under cured and really we brought out this basically brand your machine that can cure every part of the tire perfectly so that goes back to the design point so if we can now really stretch you know the point of design where we can say we can have that thinner now because we haven't got to worry about the curing compromise anymore it's just not even an issue so so it's not just you know the production is one thing but it just sort of feeds back to the design process which is one of the reasons why when we look at eye extreme lightness when we look at the optimization of you know the sidewall because the sidewall does produce a lot of road resistance but there's just parts of it that just doesn't need to be there because we've got to remember with tires it's the air that carries the load not the tire yeah okay and one of the reasons EVs have become tricky let's say is because of their um the increasing weight and size we've got some kind of very much larger sizes much much they're much bigger uh they're probably 30 bigger in physical size so so it's allowed us really to to zoom in and say right well if that tire is now bigger and wider and therefore it produces naturally more traction and the weight of it produces more coefficient of friction then we can go to town with the low rolling resistance now you can do this on an ev tire but our icee tire you would not get that same benefit or you would get a trade-off or a compromise so our insistence on going down the iron was to make sure that everything we put in it would have a benefit to evs not a real specific tangible benefit so when you put everything together across those four pillars those four umbrellas of eye super mileage or this is testing me now yeah you can test me down on my notes i'm gonna have a look here i can read them out for you well you can see if i if i took them all off so eye extreme lightness eye super mileage eye sound absorber and eye perfect grip yeah if you put all those things together what does that translate to to a driver in an e-beam in terms of benefits in terms of benefits it'll it'll give you four main benefits low rolling resistance will give you more range less energy use that could be very important it might not be so important but bear in mind bear in mind that that you know really you bought an ev you know it should be very important quietness it should be much quieter it should be and you're testing me now um you should get much better adhesion with the road because the the technology we put into the tire allows the tread to remain in contact with the tarmac a lot more okay i mean one interesting thing i'll just say about when we talk about something we haven't touched on i-perfect grip when you're putting 500 horsepower through tires what tends to happen is that they will circumferentially grow the tires will expand that tends to happen in the center of the tread so that'll tend to push up well naturally that you're lifting the side the the other sides of the tire the other sides of the tread off the road so you're reducing grip which increases slip which increases uneven wear which you know all of a sudden you're in this sort of negative spiral all so it is is very important really that what we've done to that is um you know we've reinforced the right bits with aramid and steel and we've had we put variable tensions so if we can think again of this um if you think again of the the cross section of the tire if you cut through it you'd see rubber rubber in the middle you'd see lots of steel steel belts going through and then you'd see what we call aramid it looks like kevlar but we can adjust specifically the tensions of those to make sure that tire doesn't grow under high acceleration and that is incredibly important because what it means is you've got better grip better wear you know better life and much more even wear patterns truth of the matter is if you do drive it like they'll go you're going to get sort of build a probably an extremely clunky analogy here but almost like as a as a tire rolls it's almost like imagining that you're trying to do you you want to be doing a cartwheel with the flats of your palms yeah but instead someone's doing it on a on a fingertip and trying to go up on to high onto those fingertips which would raise you up but also makes you incredibly unstable and actually full palm would be a more efficient cartwheel and a safer cartwheel well palm is quite accurate or at least a smaller palm because that's the sort of contact patch you're looking at so if if you're looking circumferentially at the tire you're looking at contact patch of about two inches now as that tire turns that contact patch is transferring through a circular tire so it's that twisting of the rubber that's causing the rolling resistance that used to cause a lot of heat um and and that was where i mean heat is the enemy of tires always has been in terms of life so So if you get a handle on heat, you get a handle on the life of the tyre.

27:55I mean, I'm aware of this when we talk about this. All of these individual technical advancements are all interconnected with other parts. It's very difficult to sort of, you know, just say that does one thing, because if you do everything right, everything will work. That's a bit of an oversimplification. But generally speaking, I'm quite comfortable in saying that. Yeah. so the thing i have to ask you about because if i don't someone in the comments will is around tyre tyre particulates so how is hancock thinking about this and how problematic are tyre particulates when it comes to evs given that regenerative braking is generally how evs tend to brake okay so um there is a linear connection between weight and wear as a rule.

28:46The heavier vehicle, the more it will wear. Particular to an interesting one, that's going to be a function of Euro 7 that's coming out in 2027. And really, if you think about it, the way EVs have just cleaned everything up, I mean, what other emissions do they produce? They don't use brake pads hardly. They're lasting 150 ,000 miles on brake pads. So there's no dust particulates from there. So really, it's the last bastion of pollution from EVs. So yeah, it's going to become a big issue. There's two parts to this and two parts to the answer. One of the things we've done with the ION is it's paid a lot of attention to making sure that the life of the tire is maximized.

29:34We claim, it's very difficult to claim actual mileage. You can't. Every use is different. but there's a sort of 20 % improvement over our competitors in terms of life on these because of what we've done into that, what we put into that. And that will have a major part. But the other size is the size of the particulate. So you're looking for particulates that aren't too small, that are airborne, so that's important. And then the other part of it is what we put in the tire that become particulates. Yeah. And then another part of it is what we put into the tyre that's sustainable or not. So all these things will come together in one.

30:15So we are unclear where 2027 Euro 7 rules will fall, but it is important. We're embracing it. We've had some very good feedback in terms of where our particular levels are at the moment, especially on the ION. and it's going to be a focus of it because it will probably be the most important thing in the next three or four years when it comes to evs but then i think what i'm hearing as an ev driver and someone who does care about air pollution is that actually if we accept the tire particulates are a currently a bit of a necessary evil when it comes to tires yeah there are ways to reduce that but an in a heavier vehicle generally speaking would create more wear on a tyre the higher the wear the more particulates you're releasing into the atmosphere so actually as an EV driver if you can buy a tyre that it has is more suited to the vehicle and can extend its life it's ultimately per use perfect you're emitting fewer particulates into the atmosphere perfect perfect and and we have a lot of examples now where um you know people are deciding maybe to cut costs on time i mean it's it's the it's the market it's the market we're in it's you know we we appreciate a tire is a distress purchase yeah we understand that but it is important you know if if we've gone down the ev route if we own an ev we have a a sort of responsibility if you like to to continue to minimize its impact and and you can undo a lot of work done by the ev by choosing the wrong tire on that um you know especially when you're buying you know an ice tire that really just isn't built for that kind of power it really can chew it up quite quickly and we're back to that again because i mean particulates is important there's technology that are coming out now to trap particulates which is positive but don't forget you know when a tyre's worn out it's got to be recycled disposed of and really that's probably as big a problem in the big term so in the long term so it is under we have to understand that as ev drivers we have a responsibility to minimize that yeah i think i think that's fair and i think it comes back to that old adage of the buy cheap, buy twice.

32:46I suppose it's buy cheap, buy twice, pollute more is what we're also saying there. Well, I mean, it's interesting because, as I say, no one gets a phone call from the MOT station hearing the news they've got to buy four tyres. No one does a merry dance and says great. You know what? I was in the motorcycle industry for a while with tyres and they're completely different. you know that when when they buy a tire they want to know exactly the ins and outs what's the best what does this what even if they're never going to use it that way they want it they want to know they can get the best possible so it is important but i think i understand that replacing tires sometimes is just solving a problem you have at the time the important thing to for me and advice i would give to consumers as much as i can is don't let your tyres be a shock to you that they need replacing.

33:41We know what the laws are, or we should do, 1.6 mil around. You should be checking them carefully monthly. But the cost of a very good tyre over a not a very good tyre, while it might sound expensive to spend, I don't know,£700 instead of£400 on four tyres, the reality of it is you've got to spend£400 anyway. yeah so that extra money we're suggesting you invest take the time to work out what benefits am I going to get for it you know am I going to get some extra range out of it yes you will will that save me money well it might do I mean if you plug in at home not that much but it will public network people of which I'm one every little mix well again again it's it's um you know it's two pricing points isn't it one's 10 times the cost of the other yeah that's a whole different conversation i'm sure you'll have with someone else but you know in that case it has a massive difference yeah you know if i'm saying you know i can't remember the figures on it now so the 10 000 miles uh at home charging is about 200 pounds a year public's about 2 000 yeah yeah Yeah, I did the maths recently, partly because I need to stop talking about this because I'm so boring.

35:03But I'll be the judge of that. On principle, I live in a Victorian terrace house. And I don't think it's particularly fair that you have to do a planning application to put a charger on the outside of your house. If you've been granted permission to have a charging cable gully on the pavement. Yeah. And there are different councils offer different levels of that planning application. like either you can just do an annotated photograph but you're still having to pay for the planning application or as we're required to do we have to submit full architectural drawings which is outrageous thousands yeah and you know i can build a construction in my garden which is much bigger without planning permission so it seems a bit dark it is ridiculous yeah and and so in that process i've sort of done some calculations on you know if you did 80 of charging at home 20 on the public network versus 100 on public network and it is it's it's at least two thousand pounds difference which is well i mean it makes your job marketing tires easier but well in that case yeah because i mean i i'm not familiar with the figures with regards to who public charges and who home charges um i'm pretty sure it's like 70 80 do home charge on evs it's something like that so i'm afraid you're in the minority i am yes so i'm afraid for people who are in your position imogen really the range of attire is very important yeah but i mean it goes a little bit further than that doesn't it because obviously it's more convenient to have a longer range but i think the most important part is you know when you buy you buy a new ev or a secondhand ev you'll always pay a premium for a bigger battery won't you yeah you know and it's like between three five six thousand pounds it could be more i mean it's and really what you're buying on average you're buying 70 80 miles well if you choose the wrong tire you're going to lose half of that overnight yeah and and we've got the facts we've got we've done the the data on it we got the data um we need to do more we need to get more facts and figures like that together but um but yeah it's such an important thing it's uh as i say to i i tend to forget that people are in different circumstances and and they're more receptive to different arguments it's easy to do that well i think what's interesting about where we are in the i guess transition to electric vehicles is that well i guess there's two things one when a technology is new it seems quite intimidating to many people understandably so yeah yeah um and when it does anecdote is really important yeah and those anecdotes are so specific and unique because where we need to go and how we get there varies so dramatically based on our lifestyles and we're all individuals so that need for hyper tailorization of messaging of communication is becomes very very vital i think at this particular point i think you're right and i think you know when it comes to how do we market a product you know how do we market a product like an ion because um it's funny i was working in the everything electric show with you guys and i spoke to a lot of customers and i understood i understood it better after that but there's a bit of cynicism really do i do i really need an ev tire is there any difference you know it's i just go for the standard ones now i could say well if they buy Hankooks that would be great but really there really is a big difference I mean there really is a practical difference but unfortunately one of the the limitations we have is because everyone's circumstances are different and drive differently and most have different cars I cannot turn around and say to you this will be this this will be that because it depends it depends yeah and and and i guess some of the message might get lost in that so it's it's something i'm aware of it's something we're aware of but i think you know the the message we want to get across to people is that you know evs deserve ev tires yeah and you know by all means take responsibility for yourself and try and find out as much as you can from as many sources what they are i do wonder because a lot of people are spending you know a thousand pound for four tires on some of these evs yeah now i don't know the last white goods you bought for a thousand pounds i'm trying to think i dread to think because it's one of the things you don't really want to part with that money no you don't really do so i mean it falls into the same thing but if you're forced to do that it might just be a cooker i suppose that's top end really isn't it I don't know I've lost track of it really but you know I mean a washing machine 500 pound if you're going to spend that what are you going to do well you're going to go to the shop you're going to compare you're going to look at ratings you're going to maybe see if you can get a free subscription to which for a couple of days and see which is the best one in their review and you know not saying I've ever done it but I'm sure we all have so you're going to do some research you're going to find out yeah a lot of people will spend double that on tyres and haven't done any research and it's like to me that's I guess I've been in the business too long.

40:25But it's such an interesting challenge that you have of, you know, ultimately working on a product which looks exactly the same from a distance at least. Yeah. To a cheaper alternative. Yeah. And as you mentioned earlier, is largely a distressed purchase as well. So you're having to work really hard. yeah and and again i think what we really need to do then is so how do we as manufacturers market the fact that we make a premium tire that works well on say an ev in this instance so and we'll you know obviously there's a marketing budget for things like this but really what we're looking at here is you know involvement in top tier motorsport i mean that that really sets you apart you know we have strong presence with original equipment manufacturers so we work with all of them yeah you know with product you know and also we encourage independent validation so we work a lot i say we work a lot we provide a lot of tires for evaluation certainly with the german magazines who are pretty much the gold standard for uh you know tire tests the detail they go into i look at it and go I just don't know what you mean so yeah so really that's how we do it and and really what the the icing on the cake that really sets would set us apart is just product innovation yeah I mean that's that's all we can do you know we've got to come up with some good ideas we've got to tell people about it and tell them what the benefits are to them but I suppose that's it I think you know it's that trust I know that you work very closely with for example formulary all of the OEMs, all of the car companies that you've mentioned, obviously those top tier magazines.

42:12And then, of course, just making something that's genuinely really good. Well, that helps. That helps. I mean, you mentioned Formula E. I mean, you know, we're involved in Formula E. You'd have seen the Formula E car at Everything Electric. I mean, that's a really, really interesting, really interesting specifications and technical requirements for that. so you've got a car that produces maximum 400 kilowatt on boost so about 500 horsepower 900 kilos 600 kilowatts of regen that's what it's got to produce so sort of throws the previous discussion on its head but 600 kilowatts of regen is extraordinary and also there's only one tyre there's no wet weather there's no dry weather it's everything yeah and and the reality of it even the sizes are quite car i mean i think the front's 255 40 18 that's pretty similar to most car sizes the the technology was almost completely transferable into the iron range and and the real kicker with that we talked about how you get this power and efficiency trade-off as small as possible the real kicker with that was they're given 40 kilowatts that's what you've got to run the race race is 45 minutes plus a lap it's about 60 miles you've got 45 kilowatts plus you've got a five kilowatt fast charger takes 30 seconds so that's what you've got so you're limited with that that's what you've got for the race 45 kilowatts go out and fill your boots and anything you do to increase grip and traction at the expense of rolling resistance, you're not finishing the race.

43:58Yeah. You know? So it's like the real cauldron of this test. It's extraordinary. You know, when I heard we were joining Formula Re, I thought, oh, we've got an opportunity here. Boomf. There we go. We've got a set of EV tyres. We've got a range of EV tyres. Never mind a set. So, yeah, really transferable technology. It's been great fun. when it comes to say formula one for example tyre strategy is is the the buzzword of the moment and certainly when you watch the f1 movie like tyres are spoken about all the time yeah yeah it's logical that i guess tyres become very exposed when it comes to motorsport because it's the difference between well winning and losing yeah and it's yeah it's awesome to see how how formula e is actually pioneering things that can make their way into passenger cars in this instance with tyres.

44:51Do you want to hear some sort of figures of the comparison? It's remarkable. All right. So did you know that a litre of E10 petrol has got 9.2 kilowatts of potential energy? I didn't know that. Okay, there you go. You can have that. So what does that mean? So if you had a Formula E race and a Formula One race over the same distance, so a Formula E distance, a Formula E car would use 45 kilowatts of energy and a Formula One would use 400 kilowatts of energy. Yeah. You know, that's what we're talking about here. You know, nearly 10 times less energy required for the race. I know it's not sexy, but it is kind of the future.

45:31Yeah. You know, and it is, those facts may be, you know, them aside. I mean, it's great racing, but, you know, that from a, you know, a technical challenge from a manufacturer like ourselves with all our technicians and boffins who just want to get on with the next thing i mean it's just perfect yeah i mean it's so these facts are always so useful to hear because when you think about evs versus internal combustion engine equivalents like regardless of your politics regardless of how you feel about the noise or whatever yeah if you were like skipping down the road chucking money just over your shoulder versus someone who's like running down the road and keeping the money in their hands yeah you'll be like what on earth are you doing this is like totally inefficient and so wasteful but energy is a little bit more abstract for people it's a difficult thing to grasp i mean i think a couple of years ago when energy prices went ballistic yeah i think people really dialed in yeah and then they came back down again they're not cheap they'll never be cheap i don't think that's a whole different conversation but it really does make you you know it really does make you think well hang on you know these are these are costs we were all paying i don't know 60 pounds for electricity and gas or 70 pounds and then it was 200 pounds yeah and it's like well hang on i've got to save some money here yeah yet yet people are still spending 220 230 240 pounds a month on doing nothing in a in a fuel car in a in an internal combustion engine unless of course you've got a public charge image for that i'm sorry fortunately we gotta sort it well i've got to get it sorted i've had various conversations And unfortunately, my gym does at least have free charging, which is good motivation to go there.

47:31I'm really conscious that I could chew your ear off for many more hours, because as we promised at the start of this, this is a really interesting topic that people perhaps don't give as much consideration as they definitely should. so I suppose my last question is if there is just one thing that you want people to take away from this podcast what would it be I think it would be you know the reason we we have produced a tyre Hank who can produce the ION is to simplify people's choice to have a one-stop shop to have a range of tyres they can go to don't worry about the complexity don't worry about rolling resistance don't worry about this don't worry about that look into it but we're not here to add complexity we're here to help you and so you know when now you've got your ev and it's coming up to maybe looking at tires take ownership read into it get as much information as you can and and you know and let us do the complex bit because they are complex they're complex and you guys are most certainly the experts so we try we try i guarantee don't try well honestly neil thank you so much this has been this has been a lot of fun and i'm really grateful for you joining us thank you lovely lovely to speak to you thank you so much to neil for joining us on this particular episode uh thank you to andy from our team who will be editing this episode and thank you to you for listening um as ever if you could do us the honor of liking subscribing sharing with a friend doing all of the above i cannot tell you how grateful we are it really really does ensure that we can carry on telling interesting and important stories from across the clean energy transition but that's it if you have been thank you for listening and watching there's a moment when performance becomes unstoppable because once you found your drive ordinary just isn't enough The versatile BMW X3 turns ambition into action.

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