Online tyres retailer Blackcircles.com has recently welcomed an announcement from tyre company Kumho about a radical innovation in the “green” cars field: an environmentally friendly sports utility vehicle.

As almost every manufacturer offers 4×4 options, Blackcircles.com has always offered a wide range of 4×4 tyres, including Pirelli Scorpion, the Goodyear Wrangler and the Michelin Diamaris. However, traditionally, 4×4s are considered to be damaging to the environment. Usually you will never hear the terms ‘sports utility vehicle’ and ‘environmentally friendly’ used to talk about the same car, but this vehicle developed by Kumho, which they have named ‘Fortis’, accomplishes this anomaly.

Kumho Tires are currently a huge tyre supplier, producing millions of tyres for SUVs, among other types, every year and exporting them worldwide. The company is based in South Korea, but has factories in China, Vietnam, and most recently in the United States.

Rob Dolton, the car designer behind the Fortis, is in fact the only qualified vehicle designer employed in the tyre industry, and he is based at Kumho’s European Technical Centre in Birmingham. Dalton is using this car to demonstrate Kumho’s new breed of 4×4 tyres, and to show what SUVs of the future could look like.

Fortis is a combination of the brute force of an SUV, and delicate aesthetics inspired by South Korean glass sculpture. It still has a lot modern features: the drivetrain consists of four separate 100hp chassis-mounted motors for each wheel. This allows off-road traction, ESP and hill descent with trouble-free transitions between four wheel drive and two wheel drive, front wheel drive and rear wheel drive.

Mike Welch, MD of BlackCircles.com, said “The vehicle type and the terrain you drive on always dictate the best kind of tyres for you, tyres last longer if they are used for the purpose they were designed. So having tyres that can adapt to their environment is a great innovation! This is definitely a look into the future of tyre design.”

While these tyres are not yet in production, Kumho tyres such as the Kumho 769 and Kumho Ecsta are currently available through BlackCircles.com with some fantastic savings.

Via EPR Network
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