Formerly known as the Electrify Expo, North America’s largest outdoor electric car demo festival is back. Demo Days is happening soon, and new for this year is Hankook’s Auto Alley Ride & Drive Zone: an opportunity to get behind the wheel—or into the passenger seat—of EVs, hybrids, and regular gas cars without having to make an appointment or deal with any pushy salesman looking over your shoulder.
And since the experience is being put on by Hankook, it’ll also serve as an opportunity to test out the brand’s iON line of EV-specific tires. Yes, electric cars have special tires, too.
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Source: Hankook
How Are Hankook’s iON EV Tires Different?
Tires, like pretty much every part of a car, are a product of tradeoffs. Performance tires have better grip, but don’t last as long. Winter tires are great in the snow, but often feel mushy driven in the summer. Hankook’s iON EV tires are optimized for four main qualities: low road noise, long tread life, high grip, and longer EV range thanks to low rolling resistance.
Hankook tested an EV with both non-EV tires and iON EV tires and crunched the numbers. It found that iON tires are 18% quieter (crucial when there isn’t a loud gas engine there to drown out road noise) and last 15% longer to counteract the increased load of heavy EV batteries. They’re also 10% more stable on the road, and, perhaps most crucially for EV owners, result in up to 6% more driving range thanks to lower rolling resistance.
Hankook’s Auto Alley Ride & Drive Zone at Electrify Expo
Photo by: Hankook
To achieve all this, Hankook has integrated 58 patents worth of iON INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGY—such as noise guards inspired by the shape and structure of cornhusk—as well as grippier, more durable compounds. “Round Even” technology makes sure the contact patch is perfectly uniform to maximize mileage while “Opti-Tread” tech cuts down on uneven tread wear. A low-temperature curing manufacturing process makes for lower rolling resistance and longer driving range.
Hankook’s main iON models are the iON evo AS and evo AS SUV, great all-round, all-season EV tires for electric sedans and SUVs, while the iON evo is a stickier summer tire for performance EVs. For electric trucks such as the Rivian R1T or Ford F-150 Lightning, there’s the iON HT featuring an aggressive iON Clad shoulder designed to take on whatever the worksite can throw at it. Hankook has even got you covered in the winter with the iON i*cept or, if you need something studded, the iON Nordic ice. So whatever EV you want, there’s probably an iON tire for it.
Photo by: Hankook
Experience Them Yourself
The Demo Days festival will be making its way to Portland, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Dallas, and San Diego throughout the rest of the year. The first stop, however, will be in Los Angeles at the Rose Bowl Stadium on the weekend of June 27 and 28.
If you’d like to experience a bunch of EVs and Hankook’s iON tires for yourself, get your tickets here.