YOKOHAMA RELEASE OF THE GEOLANDAR X-M/T

Performance for the true enthusiast

By Joel Moranton

Originally published in Issue 23 of 4Low Magazine

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Yokohama smashes the skinny pedal to blast back into the off-road market. In 2017, Yokohama released the GEOLANDAR M/T and it has already proven to handle the toughest off-road situations by the GenRight Off Road team at King of the Hammers and running in the long Dakar Rally on the SsangYong Motorsport Tivoli DKR vehicle. With the success of the M/T, Yokohama decided to release an even more extreme tire, designed specifically for the off-road community. The GEOLANDAR X-M/T, is a more aggressive tread pattern and sidewall with sizes starting at 35” ranging to 40” currently, with 42” on the horizon. There is also talk of a sticky compound for race programs.

The Yokohama GEOLANDAR X-M/T has a new Triple-Polymer rubber compound that makes the tire very soft but still provides great tread life. A lot of time went into the tread, designed to have high performance on several different types of terrain and provide a unique look that mimicked the rock formations we all love to drive on. The massive tread voids allow the X-M/T to easily clear sticky mud. It also helps to grab the edges of rocks making it a great rock crawling tire.

We were able to get a great demo of the GEOLANDAR X-M/T on the rocks in Johnson Valley, CA. The GenRight team outfitted several different built rigs to show us what these tires were capable of. We were able to drive these rigs on a section of the King of the Hammers race course. We were able to experience the soft X-M/T rubber compound conform to rock as the large tread blocks grab traction. After GenRight let us play in the rock they took us over to the sand dunes to show us how the large voids and large side wall blocks in the tread give excellent traction in the soft sand. One would think that with this large tread void, these X-M/T would be super loud on the highway, but Yokohama designed this tire pattern to give even weight disruption throughout the contact patch. This allows the tire to be fairly quiet on the highway and increase the tread life of the tire at the same time. Most importantly Yokohama achieved great durability by using their Geo-Shield side wall which is a 3-ply construction with a full nylon cover. Combine the Geo-Shield construction with the Triple-Polymer compound and you get a tire that is very resistant to punches. 

Overall, we were very impressed with the Yokohama GOELANDAR X-M/T. Our first thoughts were the tire was super aggressive to the point that it would be horrible on road, but we were wrong. Yokohama’s engineers really know what they were doing and were able to give the aggressive off-road performance we all want with the road performance we need. We love the super soft tread compound and look forward to see how it holds up after thousands of miles. It is really cool to see a large tire manufacturer building a tire just for the off-road enthusiast. Thank you Yokohama!