With the new PremiumContact 6, Continental’s tire developers have succeeded in bridging the gap between a very comfortable tire and a sporty one. This has meant coming up with new solutions for maximum safety, high ride comfort and a tread design for superior handling. “The main requirement of the new PremiumContact 6 is to deliver uncompromising safety,” says Prof. Dr. Burkhard Wies, Head of Tire Line Development EMEA/Americas OE and Replacement at Continental. “Developing a sedan tire that is so balanced that it can meet this demanding requirement and at the same time deliver maximum comfort and precise, dynamic handling, as well as high mileage and low rolling resistance was both a major challenge and a huge motivator.”
Like its predecessors, the ContiSportContact 5 and ContiPremiumContact 5, the new PremiumContact 6 offers top-class braking performance, particularly on wet roads. The compounding experts at Continental in Hanover have come up with solutions that enable substantial progress in other tire parameters without having to compromise the tire’s high reserves of safety. By way of example, these include a new crystalline silica compound for short braking distances on wet roads across all vehicle segments. On the EU Tire Label, the new PremiumContact 6 achieves the top “A” rating for wet grip.
Continental’s chemists and engineers have also broken new ground to attain the specified marked improvement in mileage, rolling resistance and comfort. The solution was to combine an abrasion-resistant polymer compound with a supple tread pattern. As a result, the new PremiumContact 6 presents a 15 percent improvement in mileage compared to its predecessor, and at the same time interior and exterior tire/road noise is down by up to ten percent.
Along with the high requirements in terms of safety and comfort, another key development focus was on delivering sporty handling across all models of car. To this end, the tire developers adopted the shoulder design of the high-tech SportContact 6 tire and combined it with asymmetrical tread rib geometry. This “Advanced Macro-Block Design” employs long shoulder blocks that support one another, providing additional grip. The resultant complex block structure in the tire shoulder is capable of transferring even very high forces – like those generated under cornering – extremely effectively. The asymmetrical rib structure in the tread delivers a similar level of performance in transferring lateral guidance forces. This endows the PremiumContact 6 with handling properties that are three percent better than even those of the ContiSportContact 5.
In the new PremiumContact 6, Continental has developed a tire that clearly outperforms its predecessor in terms of safety, comfort and handling, as well as in the environmentally relevant parameters of mileage and rolling resistance. The available assortment includes tires for models from mid-range cars to SUVs.