In the spotlight: Michelin

It’s easy to dismiss phrases such as ‘game-changer’ as little more than marketing speak, but when talking about Michelin’s new CrossClimate range of tyres, Andy Fern uses the words with conviction.

“It’s so rare that something comes along that genuinely is very different,” says the company’s national sales manager for fleet. “I’ve been at Michelin for 17 years and it’s the biggest single launch that’s happened in my time here.

“We make step changes where we go from one product to the next generation, but it’s once in a blue moon that you have something as big as this.

“We’ve used the words game-changer, but we’ve got fleets and customers saying the same.”

So why is Fern, who took on his role after the retirement of Dave Crinson in May last year, so enthused about the CrossClimate range?

“The key thing is that it is a summer tyre that has winter certification,” says Fern. “It’s almost tailor made for what is needed in the UK market.”

At the product’s launch in Geneva in March, Michelin CEO Jean-Dominique Senard described the tyre as offering “the benefits of a Michelin summer tyre in terms of safety and longevity, but it also offers the advantage of a winter tyre in terms of its braking performance and grip for motorists driving in wintry conditions”.

Senard said CrossClimate will cost 7-10% more than an equivalent Michelin Energy Saver+ standard tyre, but less than the Alpin winter range. It will initially be available on cars, with the van range following next year. Under the European tyre labelling legislation, the CrossClimate range is graded A for wet braking and C for rolling resistance, with noise of 68 decibels.

Fern says the CrossClimate’s characteristics should appeal to fleets who want the extra grip offered by cold-weather tyres in wintry conditions, but without the cost or hassle of changing between standard and winter tyres.

“When we speak to fleets about coming in to fit winter tyres, they sometimes say it’s hard enough to get drivers just to have a car serviced when it needs to be serviced, and this reluctance from drivers contributes to the low take-up of winter tyres,” adds Fern.

This level of take-up is also partly due to recent mild winters and factors such as the expense of storing a set of unused standard tyres during the winter months and vice versa for the rest of the year. Some Michelin customers, such as British Gas, fit cold weather tyres all year to ensure mobility whatever the weather, but this is a rarity, says Fern. “Other European countries like Holland have been using winter tyres for 15 years and take-up is about 10%,” he adds. “This is a decent proportion, but they are set up for it. They have tyre hotels to store unused tyres and the mentality that ‘winter is coming, I need to get my winter tyres’.

“That is not the case in this market and may never be. The mentality today is you get in your car, you turn the key and everything should work, so this is where CrossClimate has got a big advantage.”

As part of the launch event, Michelin set up a test facility near Geneva to demonstrate the tyre’s dry braking, wet traction and grip in the snow. The manufacturer flew selected fleet operators and leasing company representatives to its base to take part in the purpose-built tests.

“Ultimately, our role is about generating demand for our product through fleet,” says Fern, who heads a team of five, including key account managers and a business analyst.

“Naturally with a product like CrossClimate, we’ve got to use it as a tool in the UK fleet market. Our competitors don’t have a product like it, so if we weren’t to use it as a lever, then we wouldn’t be doing our job.”

Michelin has a mix of solus deals directly with fleets and also supplies tyres through leasing companies. Customers include large fleets such as Addison Lee, and leasing companies such as Arval and Alphabet.

“Fleet is a decent proportion of our business,” he says. “The UK is quite a specific market within Europe. If you look at other European countries, fleet is nowhere near as big a player as it is here.”

Michelin also deals closely with fast-fit operators such as ATS Euromaster, which it owns, and Kwik Fit to cope with the ever-increasing number of tyre sizes, says Fern. “It’s got to be a three-way thing; it’s got to work,” he adds.

Jamie McWhir, Michelin’s UK technical manager told Fleet News in March the top 100 tyre sizes account for about 95% of the market, but there are probably 1,200 sizes for the remaining 5%.

It is this sheer scale of diversity that means fleet drivers have a large part to play to make the replacement tyre process run smoothly.

“Tyre centres haven’t grown in size, they only have a certain capacity, so we need to try and get the message across that drivers should book in advance,” says Fern. “The mentality, even for consumers, is that you turn up at the distributor and expect your tyre to be in stock. You don’t need to give a lot of notice because tyres are held centrally, so the right tyre can quickly be delivered to where you want it to be, but you need to get the fleet driver to think ahead.

“You don’t just turn up for a service without booking in advance, and tyres shouldn’t be any different.”

Fern says that, as well as the growing number of tyre variants, new vehicle developments mean that tyres have also grown in size. The average new tyre is now 33% wider and has a 23% greater diameter than in the early 1990s.

“Vehicles are continuing to become bigger and more powerful so tyres are getting bigger as a result,” says Fern.

“So, for example, we are seeing the growth in 17-inch rim diameters and above. It’s growing at a rate of knots and fleet is a big driver of that. The trend has not stopped yet. You look at the new vehicles that are coming on stream, you look at the latest Ford Mondeo and it’s bigger again. It’s the same with the new Volkswagen Passat.

“However, the biggest area of growth is probably SUVs. This is a new tyre size range in itself, so the complexity for the tyre distributor is getting harder and harder.”

Andy Fern on…

Tyre labelling

“I wouldn’t say it had the dramatic change that many people thought it might have, but we treated it very seriously and wanted to see ourselves at the top of the grades. We can talk about the white goods industry when energy labelling was first introduced. That took 10 years to get the industry to where it is now, where you go into a shop and the labelling is actually one of the first things you look at when you buy a new appliance.

“In a few years’ time we’ll look back and think ‘actually, do you remember what it was like before tyre labelling?’.”

Budget tyres

“Fitting a low-cost tyre is a false economy. Hertz recorded a 23% drop in its annual tyre spend two years after moving from generic tyres to Michelin due to the extra longevity and durability of our products.

“There are not many fleets not fitting premium tyres, so I think over the years we, as an industry, have collectively done a good job promoting the benefits of premium.”

Formula One

“From 2002, I was the race tyre technician assigned to McLaren for 97 Grand Prix: I didn’t miss one in five years. I was basically the contact for that team in terms of advising them on anything to do with tyres, including the camber on the car to maximise performance on our tyre. It was odd because I was a petrol head as a kid so I would watch David Coulthard on the television and a few years later I’m sat with him in a truck as his tyre advisor. It was every petrol head’s dream to do that.”