Tire Rolling Resistance and Vehicle Fuel Consumption

Tires have a very significant effect on the fuel consumption of a vehicle; consequently both SAE and EPA have developed test procedures for a laboratory measurement of the energy dissipation characteristic of tires. This paper demonstrates a good correlation between the tire rolling resistance coefficients of three radial and one bias-ply tire and the fuel consumption of vehicles when equipped with these tires. A change of 0.001 in the tire rolling resistance coefficient resulted in an average fuel consumption effect of 2.2 cc/km on the EPA urban cycle and 1.5 cc/km on the highway cycle. In general, a 10 percent change in the rolling resistance coefficient resulted in a 2 percent change in the vehicle fuel consumption.