FORT MILL, S.C. — Continental Tire has announced a major foray into retreading, which will offer retreads of each of its tread designs and offer a complete life-cycle tire solution for fleets.

The company announced its new business unit, dubbed ContiLifeCycle, will provide retreads that exactly mirror the company’s line of new tires. Continental has purchased a retread plant in Morelia, Mexico that’s capable of churning out a half million flat treads per year. Its capacity will be expanded to produce a million flat retreads per year by 2015, announced Paul Williams, Continental’s vice-president for commercial vehicle tires.

With the major expansion of its retread activities, Williams said Continental is “the first major tire manufacturer in the US to offer retreads without having to buy someone else’s legacy. Because we don’t have a history with another organization, we can start from scratch and come at it from a new and innovative approach, ensuring we develop our products completely in line with our new tires.”

Customers will now have the ability to choose the new tire that best meets their needs and then continue to enjoy the same benefits and performance right through multiple retreads, Williams explained.

“Every ContiLifeCycle product is going to exactly match our new tires in terms of design, performance and compound. Every characteristic we put into our new tires will run straight into our retreads,” he said. “It seemed amazing, you’d go to a fleet and sell them on the HDL Eco being the best drive tire but because we didn’t have a retread solution, dealers would have to come in after us when the tread is worn down and sell them some other application on some other retread that looks nothing like the tire they sold them in the first place.”

Now, customers that use an HDL Eco drive tire will be able to retread it with the exact same tread design, the company notes.

“There is no need for them to ever make another choice in terms of what they want. We don’t even change the product names,” Williams explained.

Even prior to announcing the new program, Williams said interest among fleets has been “staggering.”

“Even before we made this official announcement, we’ve been getting lots and lots of calls,” he said. “Eventually, we will span coast to coast across North America with the ability to sell new tires and the retreads produced in our Morelia, Mexico facility with the ability to reach out and touch every fleet in the US and Canada with a distribution network that can meet their needs for a full ContiLifeCycle solution.”

Williams said Continental is now seeking partners from across North America to develop its ContiLifeCycle distribution network.