When life gives you orange peels, make tires.
Said on one ever.
Until now.
Who would like an affordable, quiet, grippy, LRR tire that lasts a long time and is made from renewable resources?
Orange oil tires use orange oil extracted from very renewable orange peels to make tires. Orange peels something most people would consider trash and not think twice about tossing in the garbage can.
From what I am finding these tires just don't use a small squeeze of orange juice to make them smell nice and up their green appeal for advertising. It appears that they have truly found a way to replace most if not all the petroleum oil used in the manufacture of the tire's man-made rubber. No doubt about it, these tires are made from oranges.
I started out very skeptical about this orange oil tire thing. The whole concept screamed "too good to be true" and as we all know when something sounds too good to be true it almost always is.
The further I looked into it the better it started looking. It turns out these tires have been around for a while, but no one is really paying attention to them.
In the meantime the front tires on my bug were getting smoother and smoother.
I looked up the price for a pair in OEM size, 205/55R16 tires and found that they were on the lower end of the price scale for tires in that size. I have put the cheapest tires on other vehicles in the past and it’s no fun.
So I bought a pair of them for my bug.
They showed up at my door where I promptly brought them in.
First thing I noticed is they didn't stink up the living room with the lovely smell of a hot tire plant as other tires do. My guess is that would be a result of using the orange oil. I would wager that since these tires are not off gassing all that stench the rubber compound is more stabile.
I have since installed and tested them, putting about 1,500 miles on them and all I can say is they have made a good and proper tire. They are far quieter, have more grip than I thought any LRR tire would ever have and they are T speed rated (118MPH). I didn’t even know T rated LRR tires existed. These tires have no problem operating at the upper limit of their T rating.
So they have managed to make an affordable, higher performance tire that has a high tread life rating, rides quietly and smoothly and stuffed all that into an LRR rated package made of orange oil.
Good job.
Edit: Something I for got to add. About 4 months ago I put a pair of these in 225/60R17 on the back of our hyundai sonata. That size is about an inch taller than the original size and they were $30 per tire cheaper than OEM size. In that time we put about 7,000 miles on it.
I look forward to putting a pair on the front before winter.
And who do you think would come up with this technology?
Surely it would take unlimited money and infinite resources of one or 2 of the largest tire makers working together to develop such a thing, right?
Nope, Yokohama tire did it and they are the only ones doing it, making them all in Roanoke Virginia.
http://www.tirerack.com/tires/tires....omCompare1=yes
Orange oil tires - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
BluEarth / Sustainability / Yokohama - Yokohama Europe - Tyre company