- New PremiumContact 6 successfully combines safety, comfort, sportiness and sustainability
- Continental focuses on “Safety without compromise”
- Superb balance between handling, comfort, rolling resistance and mileage at the highest level
PORT ELIZABETH, South Africa, 7 June 2017 – Continental Tyre South Africa (CTSA) has launched the advanced new PremiumContact 6 tyre range in South Africa. The new passenger car tyre convincingly combines safety, comfort, sportiness and sustainability in a single product.
With the new PremiumContact 6, Continental’s tyre developers have succeeded in bridging the gap between comfort-focused and sporty tyre design attributes, uniting precise steering response, maximum safety and good environmental properties. This entailed developing 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 Niel Langner, CTSA marketing manager. “Developing a tyre 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 tyre performance parameters without having to surrender the tyre’s high safety reserves.
The innovations include a new synthetic amorphous 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 significant 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. At the same time, interior and exterior tyre/road noise have been reduced by as much as 10 percent.
Along with the demanding requirements in terms of safety and comfort, another key development focus was on delivering sporty handling across all types of cars. To this end, the tyre developers adopted the shoulder design of the high-tech SportContact 6 tyre and combined it with an 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 tyre shoulder is capable of transferring 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 those of the ContiSportContact 5.
The new Continental PremiumContact 6 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 product range spans 16 to 20-inch sizes designed for a wide variety of vehicles: from mid-range hatchbacks to executive sedans, as well as road-oriented sport utility vehicles (SUVs).
The new PremiumContact 6 will gradually replace both the ContiPremiumContact 5 and the ContiSportContact 5 – both of which were very popular in the original equipment and replacement markets, winning over 60 independent tests between them from 2012 to 2016.