Touring Hankook's R&D Center, Keumsan Plant and Proving Grounds

This morning, I hopped on to a bus with the other journalists and left downtown Seoul for Hankook’s R&D Center in Daejeon. The drive took about two hours, and while the country—Korea is 80 percent mountains and lush—was beautiful, I have to admit that the burly jet lag from the 13-hour flight across the Pacific made it impossible to keep my eyes open for the entire trip. After arriving, we had a Q&A session with Hankook’s top engineers before heading into the facility. Unfortunately, all the various testing gear they demonstrated for us was top-secret, so they didn’t let anyone take pictures. The first piece of equipment was the flat-track machine, which basically looks like a giant belt sander. Once it’s running, the engineers then lower a tire mounted to a shaft on to the surface, and can compress and twist it to simulate the kind of stress it will endure in the real world.    

Watching how the test rubber compressed and expanded as it was put into simulated skids and braking exercises was wild. It’s amazing how much stress tires have to endure. After that, we went to the anechoic chamber, were the amount of tire noise a given model produces is measured. This room basically felt like being inside a giant corrugated box, because the walls were baffled so all the noise would be absorbed but the strategically positioned mics. Clap your hands in here, and the sound disappears immediately. From there, we went to the tensile strength testing area, which had giant machines which pulled on little strips of rubber until they snapped, and measured exactly how much force it had taken. Now, the R&D center was cool, but as far as wow factors go, it had nothing on the Geusam plant, where Hankook actually makes tires.

Over 2100 people work at Geusam facility, and using three shifts of workers, it runs 24 hours a day, 352 days a year. Each day, it produces over 50,000 tires, 11% of which go to OEMs like Ford, VW, Renault and GM. But while the numbers are impressive, they don’t give you any impression of what the place feels like. Basically, it feels like a factory run by happy robots. Giant forklifts glide around on their own transporting materials, and to warn the human workers of their approach, they play tunes—think cell phone ring tones circa 1997. The level of automation here is simply incredible, and everyone on the tour was losing their minds. The step where strips of processed rubber actually make the transformation to tires was wild. Basically, layers of rubber and steel are wrapped around a cylinder, which then expands and pops the formerly flat rubber into a tire shape. After that, the "naked" tire goes to another part of the plant, where it’s dropped down from the overhead transport system and guided into a segmented mold, which cinches around the tire, and uses pressure and steam to simultaneously cure the rubber and imprint the tread pattern.

After we saw the completed tires emerge from their molds, we went to Hankook’s G-Trac proving grounds, where we were all able to get behind the wheel of a 5-Series BMW shod with Hankook’s Ventus V12 Evo performance tires. While the 4-miles dry course was fun, the short, twisty wet-testing area was a total blast. At the center of the circuit there’s a large skidpad paved with three rings: the innermost surface is uber-slippery basalt, the next is less-slippery bridport, and the final is regular old asphalt. Even though I completely failed, it was totally awesome trying to keep the BMW car in a controlled drift, and a couple of times, I almost managed to spin a full 360. Better luck next time I guess!