Goodyear Tyre & Rubber Company has announced plans to invest $77m in a highly automated facility in Luxembourg.
The proprietary production process, named Mercury, being used at the facility will include interconnected workstations that use additive manufacturing to produce on-demand small batches of premium tyres.
“Mercury addresses the increasing complexity in the tyre industry as the number of vehicle models and options available to consumers continues to proliferate,” said Goodyear’s CEO and chairman, Richard Kramer (pictured, second from the right).
“It gives us the capability to increase our speed and flexibility to meet the growing demand for small volumes of high-margin, premium Goodyear tyres and to deliver them to customers on demand, faster than ever.”
The new facility is set to open in 2019 and will be capable of producing 500,000 tyres a year. The site is located near to the company’s tyre proving grounds and innovation centre, where the Mercury process was developed and tested over the past five years.
Goodyear has 47 facilities in 21 countries around the world.
