Low-Rolling-Resistance Tires Gain Traction in Trucking

Since their industry introduction about two decades ago, low-rolling-resistance tires have come a long way in improving fuel efficiency, reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and making true believers out of many once-skeptical fleet operators.

Significant technological advances in recent years to further reduce rolling resistance and improve traction and tire wear have helped to increase demand for these tires in certain applications, said Daryl Bear, lead engineer and chief operating officer at fuel-economy testing firm Mesilla Valley Transportation Solutions.

“They’re just making the tires better and better all around,” he said.

Even so, these tires are not on their way to becoming ubiquitous across the entire trucking industry, Bear said, because their use still relies on specific applications. Fleets that spend more time off road or in muddy or snowy conditions, for example, will tend to gravitate toward a tire that has more traction, he said.

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Bear 

“But certainly for trucking companies that do purely highway miles [and] over-the-road applications, these tires are more common, especially as awareness of them grows,” Bear said.

Longhaul trucking is the biggest user of LRR tires today, said Jim Garrett, product category manager for longhaul and regional trucking at Michelin North America.

“At lower speed, varying load, starting and stopping or other applications, it becomes more difficult to measure the fuel savings,” he said. While regional and urban applications will still generate savings, it will be less obvious, he added.

For fleet operators on “the leading edge of fuel economy,” their decisions are not about whether to use LRR tires but evaluating which brands and models, Garrett said.

There are three things that buyers want from tires: reduced rolling resistance, or fuel economy; traction; and long life, said Mike Roeth, executive director at the North American Council for Freight Efficiency.

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Roeth 

“It’s always hard to get all three without sacrificing one for the other,” Roeth said. “But tire design has gotten incredibly sophisticated. Goodyear, Michelin — all of the leaders — are [making] highly engineered tires. In the last few years, they’ve gotten better at creating good traction, pretty good wear and good fuel economy through lower rolling resistance.”

While there are still challenges, some LRR tires can now last up to 250,000 miles, he said.

“One of the things that people complain about with LRR tires tends to be traction, and it is more with the older tires, although the tires have gotten a lot better over the years,” said Bear of MVTS.

Given that, “some fleets that are really big on meeting better traction capabilities might not be as likely to use low rolling resistance,” he said.

When first introduced to the market, LRR tires were sometimes associated with thinner tread, poor traction and very short tire life, Roeth said.

Although today’s LRR tires are far more advanced than their earlier counterparts, that initial impression has lingered in the minds of some fleet operators, he said. They don’t think the tires are worth the price.

Return on Investment

Bear often tells fleets that tires are “the absolute easiest” way to save fuel and that they result in the fastest return on investment.

“They’re already buying tires, so by simply changing a brand, they can improve fuel economy and save a tremendous amount of money,” he said.

Bear pointed to a 2023 MVTS report on fuel economy that tested the performance of different longhaul tractor tire configurations from Michelin.

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The X One Line Energy D2 tire. (Michelin)

The test found that a configuration using the X Line Energy Z+ steer tires and X One Line Energy D2 wide-base singles on the drive positions saved 8.15 gallons per 1,000 miles — a 7.04% improvement — compared with a baseline combination of X Line Energy Z steers and X Line Energy D dual drive tires.

“That’s a massive number in terms of fuel savings just for using a different brand of tires,” Bear said.

Garrett said there is not much of an overall price difference between good quality LRR and good quality non-LRR tires, and the fuel cost savings with LRR more than outweigh LRR’s additional costs.

According to NACFE research on LRR dual tires, the cost of fuel that a tire consumes due to rolling resistance is about five times more than the initial cost of the tire.

“Rolling resistance makes up 30-33% of the total fuel cost of a Class 8 truck, or about $0.13 per mile,” NACFE said. The typical purchase price of the tire is about $0.04 per mile. When the range of rolling resistance among various dual tire brands is factored in, tires could account for between $0.14 and $0.28 per mile in fuel costs.

Fuel savings from LRR tires depend on factors such as driving speed, load weight, road conditions and proper tire maintenance, especially tire pressure, said Matthew Copot, vice president of fleet management at less-than-truckload hauler Saia Inc.

“Over a large fleet, even small efficiency improvements per vehicle add up to significant fuel cost savings,” Copot said.

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For large fleet operators such as Saia, even small efficiency improvements per vehicle add up to significant fuel cost savings. (Saia Inc.)

Saia ranks No. 18 on the Transport Topics Top 100 list of the largest for-hire carriers in North America.

Matt Godfrey, president of ABF Freight, said these tires are a big part of his company’s efforts to reduce its carbon footprint.

About 60-70% of ABF’s fleet of about 4,200 tractors and more than 23,000 trailers operates on LRR tires, Godfrey said.

The fleet’s primary replacement tire recaps are also LRR tires verified by SmartWay, a voluntary program of the Environmental Protection Agency aimed at reducing freight transport-related greenhouse-gas emissions and promoting fuel efficiency.

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Godfrey 

“We make a lot of investments in our fleet each year to replace older units, reduce our carbon footprint and lower the age of our fleet — and that includes the use of LRR tires,” Godfrey said.

When it comes to the next generation of LRR technology, Godfrey said that improvements to tread designs so that they are better matched to existing non-LRR designs would be at the top of his wish list. Next on that list would be to increase the overall life of the tires so that they would be more at parity with non-LRR tires.

“That will help us reduce the number of tires in the fleet,” Godfrey said.

This in turn would help improve sustainability, reduce the labor needed to change tires as well as equipment downtime due to the increased labor activity, he said.

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About 60% to 70% of ABF’s fleet operates on LRR tires. (ABF Freight)

ABF is part of ArcBest, which ranks No. 12 on the for-hire TT100.

Saia’s Copot said he also would like to see advancements in tire life.

“You’d want to see something that wears slower, provides a longer life expectancy and potentially be capped more frequently at a lower cost,” Copot said.

For some, there’s a learning curve to understanding the value of rolling resistance tires because they remain too focused on immediate costs rather than long-term benefits, said Royal Jones, CEO of Mesilla Valley Transportation.

The truckload carrier, which ranks No. 73 on the for-hire TT100, is affiliated with MVT Solutions and several other transportation-related businesses, including a tire dealer.

“I think that 75% of people buy based on … instant cost, like what does it cost me right now to get those tires,” Jones said, adding that a smaller segment of tire buyers prioritizes tire life and retread ability.

Technological Improvements

Over time, advances in technology have improved overall tire performance.

“In the early days, tire manufacturers were limited in their ability to design fuel efficient tires,” Michelin’s Garrett said. “Most simply reduced the tread depth and used a tread rubber compound that returned the energy as the tread came out of the contact patch. This led to major tradeoffs and sacrifices in traction and wear.”

Since then, technological breakthroughs have reduced those tradeoffs, resulting in LRR tires with much better wear and traction performance, Garrett said.

“Today there is a wide range of rolling resistance in tires, making the term LRR a little hard to define,” Garrett said. “You can find truck tires anywhere along the spectrum of rolling resistance from ultra-low rolling resistance to tires with quite a high value of resistance still in the market.”

Garrett pointed to the SmartWay initiative as a good place to start for guidance on LRR tires because the program sets a threshold for tire rolling resistance at each position — steer, drive and trailer.

“As fleets become more sophisticated, continue to track fuel usage and factor that into their tire purchases equation, Michelin feels we will continue to see LRR tires growing and continually improving,” Garrett said.

Other factors that will continue to drive the industry toward more efficient tires are GHG regulations, fuel prices and social pressure, he added.

NACFE’s Roeth said the next frontier in research and development for LRR tire manufacturers is battery-electric trucks, which are heavier than trucks with diesel engines.

“Battery-electric trucks put a tremendous amount of torque into the tires, so right now they are wearing tires faster than diesel engine trucks,” Roeth said. “These [LRR] tires were made for the diesel trucks, so they’re going to need to change the designs to get the wear we need for battery-electric trucks.”

Some of the design tools and features developed for LRR are quite common and are used in many other tires today, “even those not designed to meet a SmartWay level,” Garrett said.

The criteria for some of the mostly smaller fleets that still measure tire value in cost per mile will continue “to create a market for tires using less of this LRR technology in favor of wear performance only,” he said.

Bear said that the technologies that have been developed for highway LRR tires are now filtering into other areas as well. The upshot is that this will eventually “push the whole industry into the right direction,” he said.