Episode 236: Pirelli CTO Piero Misani

The automobile is one of the most important inventions that revolutionize the modern world.

In America, the rich history of car culture runs deep as technology continues to shape

the future of the industry. Jason Stein is here to share the stories of people passionate about

cars from industry leaders and innovators to car obsessed celebrities. Buckle up as Jason takes

you inside the boardroom, onto the track and around the bend on Cars and Culture on SiriusXM

Business Radio. We welcome you to episode 229 of Cars and Culture with Jason Stein here on SiriusXM

Business Channel 132. Great to have you along for the ride again this week.

For more than a century, Pirelli has defined what performance feels like. From the racetrack to the

roadway, it has set the standard for grip, confidence and emotional connection. But a new era in

mobility demands more than speed. It demands intelligence, sustainability and innovation

at the edge of possibility. And today, Pirelli sits at the very center of that transformation.

The company's groundbreaking Pirelli Cyber Tire technology, the first intelligent tire capable

of detecting conditions that the only place a vehicle actually touches the world, has just been

honored with the 2025 AutoTech Breakthrough Award. It's a recognition that says the future of mobility

isn't just about sensors hidden deep within a vehicle. It's about the data coming directly from

the four hand prints of rubber that define every turn, every stop and every acceleration.

This is real-time awareness where it matters most, the road beneath us. Cyber Tire collects and

processes information like pressure, temperature, vertical load and surface conditions, then

communicates instantly with the vehicle to enhance driving dynamics, traction, safety systems,

EV range and even autonomous readiness. It takes a once passive component and makes it into an

active partner in decision making. And it isn't just a vision, it already has been chosen by top

performance automakers. But the innovation doesn't stop there. Pirelli is also setting new standards

in sustainable performance. Through its collaboration with McLaren on the W1 Supercar, it has developed

the first Supercar tires with more than 50% bio-based and recycled materials, all while

maintaining extreme capability. It's proved that responsibility and speed can coexist without

compromise. So what's next? How will intelligence at the tire level reshape mobility? What new

possibilities emerge when the tire becomes a source of insight, not just support? To explore

what comes next, we're joined by one of the most forward-thinking technical leaders in the industry,

Pierro Misani, Global Chief Technical Officer at Pirelli, the man helping the world rethink what

tires can do. He's my guest here on Cars & Culture. Hello everybody, I'm Pierro Misani and this is

Cars & Culture with Jason Stein. Wonderful to be with you on this program today. I know that you

have a lot of exciting news. As vehicles become faster and smarter and safer, they're also more

connected. What a pleasure to have you on the program, Pierro. Thank you, it's my pleasure to be with

you today. Congratulations, the 2025 Autotech Breakthrough Award, recognizing the cyber tire

as one of the most innovative technologies in mobility. We're going to talk about that a lot

today and this is no longer theory, this is now production, that the world, Pierro, talks about

cyber, it talks about AI, it talks about smarter versions of vehicles, but what does it mean to

have the recognition of and the validation of having this cyber tire receiving global recognition?

Yeah, that's a testification of the thing that we are moving in the right direction. You know,

connectivity is becoming one of the mainstream in the future of automotive. Sustainability and

connectivity are the two main topics we have to concentrate on and connectivity when it comes

to a tire becomes difficult to understand because everybody, when you speak about connectivity,

it speaks about the infotainment that speaks about these kind of things, but how can a tire be

connected to a vehicle or even to infrastructure because there are two ways to exploit connectivity

through a tire, both in vehicle and V2X, that means vehicle to vehicle, vehicle to infrastructure

and solace for it. The fact is that we are transforming for the first time a tire that

since many, many, many years has been able to transmit forces to a car, to a motorcycle,

to any vehicle, to steer, to brake, to control the vehicle. Today we are transforming this

object in something that still transfers forces, but then transfers also a lot of data.

Data that are collected by a sensor in the tire and then elaborated into the control of the car,

thanks in this case to algorithms that we are, Spirani has been developing since a few years.

The cyber tire in many ways, as you said, goes from a moment of force into intelligence.

What data matters most for vehicle safety and performance and what does the cyber tire actually

sense? That's a great question indeed. Let's start from the fact that the tire is the only

point where a car touches the ground. It's the only way to provide information is through the

contact patch of the tire, but tires are different. To make the story very simple, if you have a car

and you try to fit a winter tire, an all season tire or a sporty tire, these tires do have

dramatic different behaviors dynamically. Not only they exploit a different level of grip,

but they do behave differently in terms of driving dynamics. I take a very simple example,

ABS braking, for example. If you have to brake with ABS, ABS you know is working on the slippage

of the wheel. Basically when it comes to sleep, releases the hydraulic in order to stop the sleeping.

But it's a sort of trial and error approach normally today. With the cyber tire we are able

to provide to ABS the right information to, let's say, set immediately the calibration,

the parameters of the ABS to the proper value to optimize that very tire that is fitted there.

We call it the tire ID. This is something we have developed, especially after the agreement we

have had with Bosch last year. You know that we signed the development agreement together with Bosch

to integrate these data and algorithms into the controller unit of the car. The first application

is the Pagani Utopia. It's not the first cyber tire application because the first

tire and cyber tire application dates back to a few years ago with the McLaren Artura.

But the active control, I call it, of the control of the car, the stability program of the car,

the ABS of the car, through tire data is being borne by the Pagani Utopia project.

Basically the tire transmits the tire ID. What does it mean the tire ID? It's a sort of the

small digital twin of the tire itself, the tire characteristics. If you know, for example, the

Mooslip curve, you know exactly the maximum level of friction coefficient at which sleep rate

corresponds. If I take, I don't want to go too much into the technical details, but if you take a

sporty tire, a P0 Trofeo RS, for example, that is fitted on a Pagani, to get the best grip,

the best level of friction coefficient and then adhesion, you need a two, three percent of sleep.

If you fit a winter tire, this sleep rate may go up to eight, nine percent. So you understand that

your ABS has to be set always at the highest level of friction coefficient. If you know from the very

beginning of your braking, which tire is fitted and in which range you have to operate your ABS,

you immediately get valuable advantages in terms of safety and braking distance shortening.

This is a small example. Then there are other parameters you may transmit. Of course, the most

simple ones are pressure and temperature, but apparently are simple ones, but are very effective,

because once again, the dynamics of the tire is heavily affected by pressure and temperature.

So if you have a tire that is under inflated, if you have a tire that is overheated or something

like this, these characteristics of the tire do change with pressure and temperature. And so you

have to know also these parameters to have an active control, not based only on the tire that

is fitted when new, but the tire that is fitted in that very specific moment. This is the integration

inside the car, but we have also developed algorithms to control like a planning. We have

developed algorithms to estimate the wear rate, taking us into consideration not only the tire

characteristics or the car characteristics, but also the driving style of the driver. Because

maybe somebody does not know, but the highest influence on tire wear is coming from driving

style. And it's easy to think if I drive aggressively, it's different than driving smoothly. You can

experience dramatic difference in tire life according to this. So there are many features

that we have developed and that are ready to be applied on the vehicles today.

In many ways, tire data is more accurate than what cars can typically measure through indirect

systems today, correct? Correct. You said the right word, indirect. I don't think that in the

future we will see only tire data or something like this. No, we are working indeed in the direction

of a sensor fusion. So trying to integrate these data coming from the tire with indirect

measurements, with visual, with virtual sensing, in order to have always a better understanding

of what is going on and then a better safety. So indeed, typically a car reacts to something

that has happened. So all the sensors and the controllers are reactive. What we can do is to

try and make this life simple, giving true tire data, true data about the current status of the

contact between the car and the ground. In many ways, all of the safety systems that are involved

with cars, whether it's ABS, stability control, adaptive suspension, feed directly into the vehicle's

control system. But the cyber tire does more than just gather data. It's feeding directly

into those vehicles' control systems. Do I understand that correctly? That's correct.

That's correct. Somebody thinks that cyber tire is a sensor. It's not a sensor. It's a system.

The sensor only gather some data. These data are then transmitted by antennas that are in the car

to a receiver and from the receiver into the controller. But the true heart is inside the

controller of the car. In this, in our case, is the controller that we have developed together

with Bosch generating. So these data are transformed into functionalities, we say,

through property algorithms and tire libraries. In this way, you give the controller the two

characteristics of the status of the tire in a way that the controller then actively controls the

vehicle. So we make the detection, they make the activation and control. I try to simplify.

But to do this, you don't need only raw data coming from the tire. You need to transfer this

into functionalities. But you mentioned another point. Another functionality we can measure,

for example, is the effective tire, effective mass distribution of the vehicle. So through

this sensor, we also know exactly on which individual wheel is the load. Think about an SUV car. As

soon as you jump on an SUV car and you turn the key on, you have immediately the setting. So you

also work on suspensions, for example, according to the distribution of the masses. There are plenty

of opportunities that we have in front of us. And this is only the part related to the in-vehicle

application. Then there is the vehicle to everything application. Let's talk a little bit

about that. What is the vehicle-to-vehicle capability? You know that the future is for

seeing that you can communicate from vehicle to vehicle. For example, aqua planning. I mentioned

aqua planning before. We can communicate to another vehicle that I suffered aqua planning and I

controlled aqua planning on my car. But there is also the possibility to communicate this also to

infrastructure. We are currently working on a project exactly in this direction to communicate

with infrastructure. And I think this is the base of the price that we have been awarded.

It's more related to the V2X than to the stability control of the car, let me say.

Because this opens up the future mobility, the smart cities, the smart roads. So we are not

only working on projects. We have already some projects running or contracts running. Last year

we started with the Italian Motorways. There is a company that takes care of the maintenance of

the motorways. And in the past, to measure the status of the road, you had big vehicles, slow

vehicles, extremely heavy, extremely expensive, running slow, that were mapping the roads on

a certain frequency. But these vehicles are disturbing the traffic because they are very

slow, heavy, and so on and so forth. And normally they map only the right lane. Because you know

that in Europe we are forced to drive right and just overtake on the left, not like in the U.S.

where you can use all the lanes independently. This was a limitation for, let's say, the complete

mapping and the frequency of control of the surface of the motorways. Today in the cyber

tie we have to keep the normal service vehicles, vehicles that have to move from A to B, not to

monitor the state of the road, but just to transfer people to make other services for other reasons.

These companies do have their own fleets that normally travel on the motorway. While traveling

on the motorway, they provide us some data. These data are collected by the cyber tire inside the

tire itself, transmitted this time not to the control unit of the car, but to our cloud.

In our cloud, we transfer this into valuable data for maintenance, typically the iso roughness

to measure, to mention one point. You know the wear rate of the surface of the tarmac

through the iso roughness of the surface itself. So in this cloud, we process the data, the raw

data coming from the sensors inside the tire, transform this into parameters that are used

then by the company that is managing the maintenance in order to have a clear mapping of the status

of the road. In this way you have an easier decision about priorities, an easier decision

when will be necessary to maintain. So with evident effect on efficiency and costs.

And this is already up and running, but we have also started another project

at the beginning of this year, this year in 2025. There is a region in Italy named La Puglia,

which is in the southeast of Italy. And on this region fleet, vehicles of the fleet of the region

are commuting equipped with cyber tire. They are doing exactly the same I mentioned before,

but in this case, we started to use the sensor fusion. So

together with the data coming from the tire sensor, we have also data coming from cameras

on the car. The camera may be a camera that is already existing on the car. In this case,

we have a dedicated camera from a phone that is on the cockpit, for example. And through the vision,

the vision and the data from the tire, we have a complete mapping. We say horizontal and vertical,

because in this case, we can map both the surface, but also the signs, the lighting of the roads.

And you can better give a comprehensive vision of the status of the roads. And this is already up

and running. So in many ways, the city of the future is a tire that's talking to the city

of the future, isn't it? Yeah, the tire, the vehicles, everybody will try to talk, basically,

for giving his own part. We can give some information that in other ways are possible,

maybe, to be gathered, but more complicated. In this way, you have a direct measurement

through the tire, for example, or through the camera inside the vehicle. That's for sure.

That's what we consider to be the future for the smart cities or the smart roads, up to the

point that you can control, for example, the speed limit. You can control the information to the

driver according to the conditions, aqua planning conditions, traffic conditions, whatever it is.

With aqua planning, for example, you can warn through the signs on the motorway that at that

kilometer, you have a possible risk of aqua planning. In the future of autonomous driving,

maybe the car will set automatically in a different mode, will reduce speed or things like this.

So we will see lots of things going on in terms of connectivity between tire, vehicle, and

infrastructure. So road hazard warnings, traffic flow improvements, maybe perhaps even EV range

optimization at some stage. That's for sure. That's another important point. You know that the

EVs are extremely exciting to drive, silent, but extremely not powerful, with a lot of torque,

a lot of acceleration that makes life very, very, very nice. It is a very nice experience,

but you have two points. One is the wear rate of the tire, for example, because the wear rate of

EV, the higher weight and the higher torque, typically wears the tire quicker than an internal

combustion engine car. And the second point that you have to take care when driving an EV is the

battery range. So how can you take into consideration data coming from the tire? The tire through the

driving style, for example, is able to provide the same data you can have also maybe directly

from the car with lateral acceleration, things like this. To inform the driver and to make the

driver conscious of the level of, let's say, of his own driving style to aggressive, he can for

sure experience a higher wear or a lower battery range. All these things are possibly something

that will happen in the future. In the cockpit, you may have, for example, a page displayed

displaying the tire data, not only the tire data, which is the tire, but how you have used your

tire up to this moment. This is something that we are doing with another car manufacturer presently.

After this short break, I'll continue my conversation with Pierro Misami, global chief

technical officer at Pirelli. To see more cars and culture interviews, visit the Cars and Culture

YouTube channel, subscribe, comment and check out hundreds of conversations with the creators,

collectors and culture makers who are driving the industry forward. The automobile is one of the

most important inventions that revolutionize the modern world. In America, the rich history of

car culture runs deep as technology continues to shape the future of the industry. Jason Stein

is here to share the stories of people passionate about cars from industry leaders and innovators

to car obsessed celebrities. Buckle up as Jason takes you inside the boardroom onto the track

and around the bend on Cars and Culture on SiriusXM Business Radio.

Welcome back to Cars and Culture here on SiriusXM. I'm your host Jason Stein.

Now the continuation of my conversation with Pierro Misami, global chief technical officer

at Pirelli. To see more cars and culture interviews, visit the Cars and Culture YouTube channel,

subscribe, comment and check out hundreds of conversations with the creators, collectors

and culture makers who are driving the industry forward. You're the sole tire supplier of Formula

One and there's so many great headlines, great breakthroughs, great achievements as a result

of that. How much did motorsport telematics influence cyber tires development?

Motorsport is always the pinnacle of technology, there is no doubt. Very often we say that Formula

One and motorsports give us the possibility to transfer technologies to normal production,

which is basically true. But not so often we say that what we transfer are not only

pure tire technology and materials, for example, tire construction, tire materials,

but design methodologies. From Formula One, the digitalization started first.

Let's say the virtual simulation of the tire has been developed in Formula One,

in the motorsports. The first simulator was made by Dallara, together with Pirelli.

So for us as Pirelli, we have been working the first time with Dallara and then we have

transferred this to the, let's say, everyday usage cars and tires. And also the data, of course,

are extremely important in Formula One, as you know, the transfer of the data are very important

to make all the simulation. So, always motorsport is a little bit ahead of what will happen in,

let's say, the normal business. And also in this case, we have been able to learn how to get data

from there. We don't use the cyber in Formula One, but we have made some tests also in Formula

Two, for example. We have been using it in Formula Two, collecting a lot of information and also

helping us to understand how to make this sensor more robust, because Formula Two, the forces,

the accelerations and so on are dramatic. One of the key points for a tire sensor is that it's

extremely critical because of the condition it's working, under pressure, under high temperature,

but also very high acceleration. Think about when the sensor goes under the contact patch.

You have hundreds and hundreds of instantaneous G acceleration. So, you know that the body is

able to stand seven, eight G. Here we speak about many hundreds of Gs. Of course, it's a peak,

but it's every wheel turn, the sensor will suffer this. So, it has led us to develop a robust sensor

today. Let's talk a little bit about sustainability. The McLaren W1 program proves that high

performance and responsible materials both can exist together and they can actually excel together.

How did that collaboration begin and why was the W1 the right car to showcase for this program?

Well, the W1 is the most challenging in terms of performance, of course. As I mentioned before,

the motorsport is always something that challenges us to the extreme of the technology. In this case,

W1 is probably the street car that hosts. It's mostly similar to the supercar on the track,

but we don't stick only to the W1, because of course we try to make this on many other projects.

How do we develop sustainability, for example, together with safety and performance? I say

safety and performance, because for me safety and performance are one word. If you have a

performing tire, you have also a safe tire. And this has to go side by side with sustainability.

We call it eco-safety design. We don't have making a sustainable tire a compromise on safety,

it never. Pirelli is a brand that is recognized for performance and indirectly then for safety.

Power is nothing without control, we always said, to highlight how the performance and the safety

are strictly connected. So we demonstrated the possibility to do the two things side by side.

Two years ago, we launched the P0E, the first tire in the UHP segment, which across the full line,

the full production line, the full range has minimum 55% of materials biobased or recycled,

certified, not told only by Pirelli, but certified by foreign body, of course. With JLR, we have made

already a project with over 70% to demonstrate that the path is there to make a sustainable

tire in terms of contact of material. And the second point to make a tire that has a very

low rolling resistance, making also a very high performance. We have been the first to

keep on the BMW, for example, a winter tire that has the A-class label providing the best

winter performance. So as you can see, we are committed on different projects. W1 was a very

challenging and tough project for the very high end, but then we have also some others

that show how we can really try to make sustainability live together with safety and performance.

And you used a lot of simulation technology right from the start. You're always using

simulation technology. Then comes physical testing. You did physical testing in Italy,

Spain, Sweden, validating performance in extreme conditions. What made that process so critical

to understand? Because when you move from simulation to pavement, I mean, things can change

remarkably, right? It's true, but it took us a few years to refine again the programs because

the point is you can buy a driving simulator, but it's not the driving simulator that makes a

difference. It's your capability of elaborating the specific functionalities of the tire through

algorithms, the way you simulate upper planning, the way you simulate wear rate, the way you

simulate noise. Recently with XTM and a new product we have launched in the US, we have

been able also to simulate mud traction, for example. Impressive. As you say, it's difficult

to correlate something that is simulation with something that is real life, but through the

time we have been able really to refine the programs and algorithms behind this. The driving

simulation is only a tool that is available for everybody, but the true core in the capability

of developing software today for us that allow us today to, let me say, to simulate more than

80% of the total environment of the tire performance virtually and then have practically

only a verification on the car. Then the driving simulation is very important because

you have absolute performance of the tire, but also relative performance, performances that

are related to the kind of vehicle, and you know that to get an homologation you have to

tune the tire for that specific vehicle. Then it's necessary, of course, to make

the session on the simulator, getting the black box of the car from the manufacturer in order to

get the best performance for that specific car. So there are two ways to use the

virtualization. To make a new product line, 80% of the performance, as I mentioned, is already

virtualized, but then anytime you have to make an homologation, you have to make a tune for the

specific vehicle. And in this case, the simulator is this key to reduce the number of physical

loops that you have to do while developing. Piero, let's talk about the future a little bit.

Where do you see the next big inflection point coming from? Is it raw materials? Is it manufacturing

innovation? Is it mass balance sustainability scaling or AI assisted development? Where does

the next inflection point come? Interesting, because all of them are key to us, because when we

speak about sustainability, we have to speak about three directions of sustainability. The

environment sustainability, which everybody recognizes, but we have a social sustainability

that means that we have also to be able to provide safety to our drivers and the economic

sustainability. The company must survive and here comes to the manufacturing efficiency side

that you mentioned before. We have more than 31,000 employees in Pirelli and we have a

responsibility versus them. So all these points are very important. We have to make tires that

have the best performance in a way that are manufactured in an efficient way in a factory.

This is the true challenge, but the most important change we have experienced today

is AI. I go back to the point of simulation. Simulation is based on physical models.

You have a physical model of the car and a physical model of the tire. You match the two

and you simulate how they work together, let me say, but it's based on multi-body concepts.

It's based on physical laws. Very good, but a tire is made of material, is made of compounds

typically and this compound you have also to describe into your physical simulation.

And to describe this material is very challenging because it's something far from what an engineer

studies. An engineer studies small deformations, linear behavior, and not too much temperature

dependent. A tire is exactly the opposite. It's absolutely temperature dependent and everybody

recognizes this through warm-up, over-eating, or things like this. It's non-linear, heavily non-linear

in the behavior and it's also characterized by materials that have a very big deformation.

We have deformations of 200% under the contact patch, which is an enormous deformation. To describe

a compound through physical model and chemical models is dramatically complex,

let's say, still today is very far from being realized. So what we have done is to try and

switch to artificial intelligence. We have made, to make the long story short, something similar

to what the pharma industry has made. Pharma industry is today developing molecules for pharma

on the base of AI. We develop compounds on the base of AI. What does it mean? We have a huge amount

of laboratory data on our materials, on our compounds, that has been collected through the last

years. We have been able to feed some dedicated artificial intelligence programs with this data

to train them, connecting the laboratory data with the physical, let's say, the

characteristic of the compound, the ingredients of the compound, in order to get the best way to

develop compounds, not through virtual simulation based on physical models, but based on artificial

intelligence. Fascinating world. Just a few more questions. When you connect the dots,

cyber, tires, intelligence, plus sustainable supercar, tire, innovation, what's the bigger message?

The tire is now a performance component, a sustainability component, a data intelligence

component, all at once, isn't it? Yeah, today is all in one. It has always been something related

to sustainability and safety. Today, we include intelligence. This is the true novelty of the

cyber tire. Yeah. When we look at one day, the tire in the future, could we see fully circular in

terms of materials and maybe fully intelligent in terms of real-time monitoring?

For sure. I do see both these possibilities. Let's start from the material side.

If you think that up to a couple of years ago, 70 percent of the tire was coming from fossil

based. This was the standard. Today, we have already proven that we can revert this. Less than 30 percent,

the project with JLR, for example, is fossil based. In a couple of years only, we have been

able to make it. Let's say some concepts. We have made a concept with Volvo, where we experimented

that is up to 94 percent bio-based or recycled. The path is there. The point would be the

capability of defining materials available at a reasonable price and at a large scale to be

produced at the industrial base. This is the true challenge today. The ideas we do have,

the point is to find a way industrially to make them on large scale and economically possible.

From the integration in terms of connectivity, we have already said this is only the first step.

We will see this integration both in car and to the infrastructure. I do believe we will see

a lot of changes in the future in this direction. This must be amazing for you. I know personally,

you were an aeronautical engineer originally. To have this kind of technology

living within tires is probably something you could not have imagined when you first joined

Pirelli in 1985. I have already more than 40 years of experience inside. That means that

it has always been challenging. It has always been providing, let me say, really challenging

satisfaction while working. This is indeed a huge transformation we are having in these days

through connectivity and sustainability. The true point is to try and match the experience

that I can bring in with the competencies that the young guys are providing, the young generation

that have been digitally born. We discussed about technology, but the true, let's say,

winning point will be to have the best people. The best people today are the young people that

are digitally born, no doubt. But you have to find a way to match also a little bit of experience

to let the old guys like me do their part. Who will be able to match in the best way

this experience with the digital speed of the new generations will be the winner.

So, all in all, we will go back to the point where the best people will make the best company.

And one of the most important things going forward is that you have to have

a set of tires that have different personalities depending on different cars.

I just think of a couple of examples, three bespoke tires, the P0R, the Trophail RS,

and maybe the Winter 2, each designed for different personalities of the car.

But you also have to ensure that they all maintained an over 50% sustainable content

without sacrificing quality. Is that correct? Absolutely correct. Not only,

it has to maintain the brand identity. So, of course, you have to provide the sustainability,

you have to provide the safety. But then you have to make tuning on the requirement of the

specific vehicle manufacturer for a specific car to be fitted. But at the same time,

your customer has to recognize I'm driving on a Pirelli tire because he has expectations

on the Pirelli tire. So the Pirelli values, the Pirelli expectation must be satisfied anyhow.

This is the way we work. We customize versus the customer, keeping an identity, a brand

identity, and the product recognition that is always the Pirelli product.

So that at the end of the day, the driver doesn't feel the tire, but the car feels the tire.

I always say the best way is to have a driver that enjoys driving, does not have to take care

about the car or the tire. At the end, he has to think about the tire, not while driving,

when he sum ups what kind of a good experience he has had while driving later on. Otherwise,

it means it has a problem while driving. While driving, only to enjoy the driving pleasure.

That's it. Yeah. What comes next for you? What are you most excited about going forward?

Today, the biggest challenge is coming also in the manufacturing side. I just mentioned very briefly,

but for me, the biggest change is the new revolution inside. The factories are connected

with IOT, artificial intelligence, digital twins. Also, there is a true revolution. In the past,

we have been working on the manufacturing side, always in terms of efficiency,

a lot in terms of delocalization, but now the world is going more local for local.

And you have to stress a lot the automation and you have to stress a lot the digitalization

in terms of inside the factories. And this is, again, another challenge that is coming to me

personally, which excites me quite a lot. Is intelligence the new competitive differentiator

in the performance tire market? Could be. Could be. But you have only to consider that

the physical tire anyhow is what we live off. And the physical tire has to be

the best performing tire to allow you to enjoy in a safe way. So drive safely, but drive with a lot

of, let's say, of satisfaction. At the end, we come always to the highlight. Power is nothing

without control. So we have to give power, but we have also to give control.

Well, congratulations on your 2025 Autotech Breakthrough Award and the Pirelli Cyber Tire

and a lot of really interesting partnerships. Can I ask one more thing? How much time do you get

to test these tires and what's the most fun that you've had where you've had the chance to test them?

Any time I jump on a car or on a bike, because most of my experience was on two-

Motorcycles. Yeah.

Motorcycles. Yes, I was managing also the business unit motorcycle tires inside Pirelli.

The fact that we are able to enjoy while driving is a sort of motivation. So the passion is also

a driver for us. I mentioned before that we need the best people, not only the best people,

but the best people that do leave this as a passion. You have to be passionate for automotive.

You have to be passionate for cars, for motorcycles. And that's exactly what I experience anytime

I jump on a car or sit on a bike. Can you tell your Lewis Hamilton story for one minute about

his 44 bikes? Yeah, you have also the possibility to meet extraordinary people. We were discussing

about Lewis Hamilton and I still remember. I was so excited when I saw how Woody is also on a bike

because he was making 44 pieces of the MV Agusta F1000 and he was testing personally this bike in

Vizzola on our test track in Vizzola. It was amazing to see such a car champion doing great

things also in Vizzola. Congratulations on your 40 years at Pirelli and you could not have imagined

40 years ago what we are talking about today, I'm sure. I will see you at a race track in North

America in the future or anywhere actually. I would love to see you anywhere, but congratulations

on the cyber tire and on everything that you've been able to do and on the award as well.

Thank you, Jason. I appreciate it. I really look forward to meet you. Maybe Miami since you're

living in Florida. Sounds good. It will be easier for you. Next May. Yes, exactly. That's right.

You know the calendar very well. Thank you, Piero. I appreciate it. Congratulations again.

Thank you, Jason. See you soon. A big thanks to my guest again, Piero Misani, Global Chief

Technical Officer at Pirelli. To see more cars and culture interviews, visit the Cars and Culture

YouTube channel. Subscribe, comment and check out hundreds of conversations with the creators

collectors and culture makers who are driving the industry forward.

That's episode 229. I'm your host, Jason Stein. We'll see you down the road.

Episode 236: Pirelli CTO Piero Misani

About this episode

Pirelli

sustainability

W1 Supercar

Autotech Breakthrough Award

cyber tire

connectivity

infotainment

V2X

sensor

contact patch

ABS braking

Bosch

Pagani Utopia

Mclaren Artura

tire temperature

tire pressure

tire wear

stability control

adaptive suspension

aqua planning

torque

battery range

Formula One

virtual simulation

Dallara

data transfer

G acceleration

Mclaren W1

W1

UHP segment

Mercedes-Benz Aclass

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