Pirelli has started production in the United States – more precisely at the Rome, Georgia plant – of Cyber Tyre tires: this is a hardware and software technology that allows data collection through sensors embedded in the tires, their processing through the company’s proprietary algorithms, and their transmission to the vehicle’s driving and control systems.
CYBER TYRE, THE CHINESE SHAREHOLDER, AMERICAN LAWS AND THE ITALIAN GOLDEN POWER
Cyber Tyre is an advanced technology, in short, but also politically “sensitive”: it involves the fact that Pirelli’s largest shareholder – whose headquarters are in Milan – is the Chinese state-owned company Sinochem, with 34.1 percent. Pirelli has tried to avoid the banning of its products in the United States – a very important market: worth over 20 percent of revenues – after American authorities prohibited the sale of Chinese technologies for “connected vehicles,” for security reasons. The issue has seen multiple interventions by the Italian government, with the golden power, to limit Sinochem’s influence.
WHAT PIRELLI DOES AND WILL DO IN GEORGIA
Pirelli says it considers the start of Cyber Tyre production in Georgia a “key step for its product and industrial strategy” that “confirms the strategic importance of the United States in the company’s global growth path.” The statement also reads that the U.S. market is “advanced,” “where smart mobility and digital solutions are rapidly expanding”: therefore, Cyber Tyre technology would represent “a distinct competitive advantage.”
Pirelli has been present in the state of Georgia for over twenty years, and the Rome plant is already dedicated to advanced tires for the North American region. Moreover, the facility – which also houses a research and development center – will soon receive an upgrade to the manufacturing line with “the latest evolution” of the Mirs (Modular Integrated Robotized System) process, highly digitalized and robotized, available exclusively at this site.
Mirs, explains Pirelli, “further enhances robotic production capabilities, increasing productivity, flexibility, and quality, and allows a direct connection between product design and its industrial development.”
FROM MILAN TO ROME
The large-scale production center for Cyber Tyre, in short, will be Rome, Georgia. But the company’s most important research and development center is in Milan, from which “innovation then spreads worldwide,” as declared former Head of Cycling Division (2020-2024) Matteo Barbieri.
