Nitto Tires New Motivo Tire Brings High Performance And Safety To Everyday Moms and Families

Last week, I got the exciting opportunity to flee chilly Boston and head to sunny Phoenix, Arizona to enjoy a Ride and Drive event held by Nitto Tires. I traded in my flats for sneakers and my Pathfinder for a Jaguar, and talked cars, tires & more with the leaders in the tire industry—all while soaking up the desert sun.

Scottsdale Plaza Resort
An airport shuttle awaited my arrival and whisked me off to Scottsdale Plaza Resort, an upscale resort with a laid-back attitude nestled in the beautiful Scottsdale desert. After a few hours, I met up with the group for a delicious 5-course meal and even better conversation. Journalists from automotive trade magazine and bloggers mixed and mingled, making for a unique fusion of personalities and backgrounds. Conversation and food lit up the night, preparing us for our big ride and drive event the next day.

Nitto Tires Classroom Session: Tires 101
The following morning, we arrived at a hotel conference room for a quick session to learn all about Nitto’s new Motivo tire and the fresh technology behind it. What I learned was fascinating. Historically, Nitto Tires catered to car enthusiasts—specifically hard-core off road and racing fans. The company formed in 1945, and quickly became the go-to resource for car enthusiasts searching for ultra high performance tires.

In recent years however, Nitto engineers began shifting their focus. They’ve translated their special experience in high performance tires seamlessly into tires fit for more everyday car users—women and families. In late 2011, they introduced their first-ever active, everyday all-season tire engineered to perform in all weather conditions.

The Motivo tire is made 100% in the USA at Nitto’s US-based facility—which is the only automated car and light truck tire manufacturer in the world. This means they’ve developed cutting-edge technology to build their tires through an automated process, resulting in less human error and expertly crafted tires. Then, the tires are fully inspected by qualified engineers at the end of the process.

Ride & Drive Event
Later that day, we shuffled into a bus that took us straight to the ride & drive track to test our classroom knowledge in the real world. Awaiting us were four beautiful Jaguars, each fitted with different Nitto tires so we could test the higher-performance tires against the new, everyday Motivo tire and see how they compared. The tracks? One wet track and one dry figure-eight track. I flew down each track at high-speed and loved the thrill of the ride. The Motivo tire could handle all the twists, turns and speeds with amazing break power on the wet track and easy maneuvering on the dry track. Everything I learned in the classroom made complete sense once I realized how safe, comfortable and confident the technology beneath me made me feel.

What makes the Motivo Tire a good fit for Moms and families?

• Tread Wear: I especially love that the tire helps track tread wear progression. This gives drivers a better visual benchmark of the wear and tear of a tire. They’ve created a unique system of dots that, if the inside and outside of the tire don’t have the same number of dots, you know something needs to be adjusted. I never know when my tires need to be looked at, so this simple dot identification tool is so helpful! Plus, there’s a 60,000-mile treadwear warranty.
• Special compound: The Motivo’s brand new rubber compound isn’t used at any other tire manufacturer. The engineer described it as a “cake mix” of materials sifted together to create this special compound that increases treadwear life. A brand new special wear-oriented polymer is combined with Silica (which allows the tire to flex more) to make your tread life last even longer. Cool, huh?
• Sipes: Siping cuts slits at a 90° angles across the tread, providing thousands of gripping edges for better traction and stopping power in the wet and snow. The Motivo has more sipes than a traditional tire, which increases the biting edges on the tread block to deliver increased traction. Better traction means a safer drive!
• Stability: Continuous solid center rib provides straight-line stability. Plus, there’s an exterior pattern design with larger tread blocks that provides stability for enhanced dry and cornering performance. This is great on sharp turns—I found it extremely helpful in the figure-eight course we did.
• Noise: Even when driving at high speed, the noise of the tire was nice and quiet.
• Visual appeal: We eat with our eyes, right? Well it’s the same when shopping for anything, including a tire. Nitto loves design and believes a safe tire can also be a sexy tire. Along with all the all-weather features of their tires, it also has a sophisticated, chic look. (Yes, I just called a tire chic.) But it’s true—the design is flawless.

We topped off the event with another great dinner, this time, loaded with knowledge about all things tires, cars and most importantly, the amazing technology and the people behind it. The crème brûlée was just the cherry on top of the day.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Disclosure: Melanie Cohn attended an all-expenses paid trip to the Nitto Tire Ride and Drive event on behalf of Mom Central.

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