MINING TYRES
Yokohama’ s new OTR tyre plants in India and Mexico
The Yokohama Rubber Co Ltd in May 2026 announced its plan to build two new mining & construction machinery tyre plants, one in India and the other in Mexico. The construction of the new plants is a followup to Yokohama Rubber’ s February 2025 acquisition of the OTR( off-the-road) tyre business of The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, and OTR tyre production acquired from Goodyear will be transferred to the new plants. Yokohama Rubber also plans to install new production equipment at the plants to expand their production capacity for giant( ultra-large) OTR tyres.
The new 460,000 square metre greenfield plant in India will be built in Gopalpur in the state of Odisha and will have an annual production capacity of 9,150 tons( rubber weight), with a planned capital investment of US $ 130 million. Construction is planned to begin in the third quarter of 2026, with production scheduled to start in the third quarter of 2028. The new plant will take over a portion of the acquired OTR tyre production that currently is outsourced to Goodyear plants in Europe, the United States, and other regions.
The new 610,000 square metre brownfield plant in Mexico will be built in Saltillo, Coahuila, on the same site as a new passenger car tyre plant currently under construction, as part of a Phase 2 expansion of that site. This new OHT plant in Mexico also will take over a portion of the OTR tyre production currently outsourced to Goodyear. This plant will have annual production capacity of 10,650 tons( rubber weight), with the related capital expenditure amounting to US $ 115 million. Construction is planned to begin in the third quarter of 2026, with production scheduled to start in the second quarter of 2028.
In addition to establishing these two new plants, Yokohama Rubber is gradually transferring production of OTR tyres from Goodyear plants to an OTR tyre plant in Romania that the company acquired in May 2025 and to existing production sites in Japan, the Czech Republic, and India.
This enhancement of its OTR tyre production network is part of Yokohama Rubber’ s effort to maximise the synergistic effect of its acquisition of Goodyear’ s OTR tyre business, one of the strategic investments aimed at achieving‘ Hockey Stick Growth’ during Yokohama Transformation 2026( YX2026), the company’ s medium-term management plan for fiscal years 2024-2026.
Insights into HaulSight
KalPRO HaulSight is a new system from Kal Tire which combines truck-mounted sensors by Decoda, plus Kal Tire’ s TOMS( Tire & Operations Management System) and its expert condition monitoring teams to deliver instant alerts about hazards such as spillage, road undulations and high G-Force zones that can slow operations, waste fuel, and damage trucks and tyres; instant insights and alerting on berms that do not comply with standard height requirements to improve safety; expert assessment of flagged issues by 24 / 7 condition monitoring teams and automated, priority-based work orders to respond quickly. IM spoke in-depth to Christian Erdelyi, Kal Tire Mining Tire Group Technology Services Director about the technology.
Q How do HaulSight and your thermal imaging technology based system KalPRO TireSight complement each other at mining operations?
With TireSight, we use imaging technology to look for damage on tyres and trucks. And while the system helps us to identify those damages quite early in the cycle, what the system doesn’ t do is help us in detecting where the damage is coming from in the first place. So we were looking for ways to explore where tyre damage is happening and why it’ s happening but also how long does it take for damage to progress and evolve to failure. We found Decoda – which offered a LiDAR and camera pack for the rear of the truck that faced backwards when the truck is reversing and loading and dumping areas to look for obstacles and collisions. Since the partnership started we then worked together to further develop the product for our needs in mining into also having a front sensor pack and starting to also record shocks and undulations and speeds as the truck is travelling so that this data can be correlated with the haul road imaging data and understand the impact of all these hazards. If the Decoda sensor sees spillage, for example, we can use HaulSight to market those spots on the road. One of the other features that Decoda had already was the measuring of berm heights. And from there came the question, could we also measure the width of the road and map out portions of the mine site? These are some of the different evolutions that came to the product following our collaboration.
Q Are there any other specific tweaks or changes or additions that you have made to the system to make it more applicable to the needs of mining?
Yes, we have included options in terms of hardware to go with the needs of the mining customer. There’ s a full system with a front and rear sensor pack. We also introduced self-cleaning cameras so that nobody needed to go and clean it. That’ s important, especially in oil sands, iron ore and coal operations. Finally, we wanted a more portable system, so we could deploy it more quickly to customer sites- so again we’ ve worked with Decoda to come up with a system that gets mounted to the handrail of the truck – and on the rear we can quickly deploy too. We also have what we call the light system, which has the telemetry and accelerometers but not the cameras or LiDAR. We can still use this to complement the fleet management and the telemetry data coming out of the trucks themselves. We are also working on new functionality – we had a recent request from a customer asking if we could help them detect high impact loads, such as where the shovel is dropping loads from greater heights or the shovel is impacting the truck body. We can see the spikes and the accelerometer data so we’ re trying to help that customer by building a new feature and visualising this type of information.
Q What’ s the advantage of having the HaulSight sensor on the front and the rear? Is one sensor not enough to see the condition of the road?
One sensor is enough to see the condition of the road, but it’ s not enough to see the condition of the road when the truck is reversing into a loading area, because the trucks are always reversing into it. And because the truck normally isn’ t driving front facing through that area, we have no chance of capturing it. The same to spillage, when we want to see what rocks are dropping off the truck- we need to have the sensor at the rear to capture this type of information.
Q How would you define the HaulSight package versus just the Decoda sensor package in isolation?
HaulSight is the integration of the Decoda sensing pack with everything we know about the customer in our proprietary TOMS along with the insight provided by our condition monitoring analysts who validate and interpret system outputs, summarise key data sets in reports and streamline the communications with the mining customer- they only want alerts on issues that are critical to act upon because there’ s already so much data noise in control rooms. We also supply the work order integration, so that when HaulSight detects something and we have agreed we want to remove some spillage or fix an undulation, a work order is created and in the
42 International Mining | JULY 2026