SNOW QUEEN
I have a thing for snow. When other people head south on vacation, I go north. I come by it honestly. I was born and raised in Northern Ontario, and my mom is a Finn. So when editor-in-chief Ed Loh needed someone to fly to the top of Finland and breach the Arctic Circle to test Nokian’s newest tires, the formulation of a plan began.
Snow, tires, cars, reindeer, northern lights, and saunas—time for a good old-fashioned Motor Trend road trip. Spoiler alert: Things got personal along the way.
Nokian Tyres is a big deal in Finland. The company traces its history back to the founding of the Finnish Rubber Works in 1898, and it invented the winter tire in 1934. Today Nokian has a 1,730-acre winter test site near Ivalo, 180 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
TAKE THAT, PUTIN Detroit editor Alisa Priddle flaunts her Canadian and Finnish roots at a stop with Murmansk, Russia, in the background.
Although Nokian is a household name in Europe when shopping for winter tires, in order to grow it must enter the mainstream with new lines of all-season and all-weather tires. Hence its desire to raise its profile in the U.S.
New tires have been developed for North America, and Nokian is building a $360 million tire plant in Dayton, Tennessee, with the ambitious goal of doubling sales in five years.
So we headed to Lapland (a region covering the northern third of Finland) for a taste of what this small player—$1.7 billion in sales in 2016 versus $32.5 billion from giant Bridgestone—with big plans has to offer.
Our Motor Trend trio included video-grapher Cory Lutz—a fellow Canadian in danger of getting soft after years of living in Southern California—and photographer Robin Trajano, who was born in the Philippines, now lives in L.A., and could provide thin-blooded comic relief in these frigid arctic climes.
Day 1
We rendezvous in the capital of Helsinki and hop a 1.5-hour flight to the northernmost airport in the European Union. “Welcome to Ivalo,” the airport sign says, showing a current temperature of minus 4 degrees Celsius (25 degrees Fahrenheit). No big deal; my hometown in Ontario has dipped to minus 40.
