Korean tyre company Hankook has just unveiled the latest addition to its premium comfort, or touring tyre range.

The Hankook Ventus Prime 4 is purported to improve upon its successful and award-winning predecessor in the areas of mileage, rolling resistance, dry handling, and refinement. It will be available in 67 sizes for both car and SUV applications, ranging from 16 to 20 inches (diameter), 195 to 255mm (tread width), 40 to 65 (aspect ratio, aka profile, aka sidewall height), and H to Y (speed rating).

One of the biggest breakthroughs for the new tyre was in terms of wear rates. Klaus Krause, head of the Hankook Tire Europe Technical Center in Hanover, Germany stated they were able to increase the durability of the tyre by about 20 percent – without compromising on other aspects.

This has been achieved with a “high mileage compound technology” that increased the rigidity of the tread blocks, reducing rolling resistance and improving abrasion resistance, hence leading to less tyre wear.  A higher silica content and revised tread pattern are also claimed to improve wet driving behaviour and braking performance.

Steering response on dry roads was another area targeted by the engineers, which is why the Ventus Prime 4’s tread blocks have more rounded edges than before, to better resist their edges rolling or folding over during hard cornering. Functionally, this results in a tyre that is more stable maintaining its shape under high loads.

Finally, Hankook’s engineers also took inspiration from acoustic testing to improve the Ventus Prime 4’s refinement. So just like how the walls of anechoic chambers are fitted with many foam wedges to absorb sound reflections, so too do the edges of the Ventus Prime 4’s tread blocks feature wedge-shaped structures that fulfil the same purpose. With that, Hankook claims the Ventus Prime 4 is up to 2.5dB quieter at speed, which, due to the decibel scale not being linear, means this difference can be perceived as up to 20 percent quieter to the human ear.

The Hankook Ventus Prime 4’s predecessor, the Ventus Prime 3, was the company’s best-selling tyre in Europe since its introduction in 2015, and was a two-time winner of Europe’s biggest summer tyre test (with over 50 competitors), organised by German’s largest car magazine Auto Bild.  Closer to home, the Ventus Prime 3 was one of the contenders in AUTA’s Tyre Test 2022, coming in a very close 2nd place in the Eco category. Click here to see in detail how it performed in Singapore’s first ever empirical, scientific tyre test!