Bridgestone Invests in TIER IV,

a Start-up Developing Software for Autonomous Driving

• Bridgestone announced today that it will invest in TIER IV, Inc., a start-up which leads the development of “Autoware”, the world’s first open-source software for autonomous driving, and provides solutions necessary to develop and manage autonomous driving vehicles to various partners.

• “Bridgestone Innovation Park” and its proving ground “B-Mobility” will be the place of the co-creation activities with TIER IV and Bridgestone, Bridgestone will contribute to deployment of autonomous driving technology, which will also benefit to accelerate the development of advanced tire technology and next-generation mobility solutions.

• Bridgestone has committed to non-stop mobility and innovation that keeps people and the world moving ahead though this co-creation, aligns with the “Extension” value of the Bridgestone E8 Commitment.

Tokyo (July 19, 2022) — Bridgestone Corporation (Bridgestone) announced today that it will invest in TIER IV, Inc. (TIER IV*1), a start-up which leads the development of “Autoware”*2, the world’s first open-source software*3 for autonomous driving, and provides solutions necessary to develop and manage autonomous driving vehicles to various partners. Bridgestone will contribute to establishment and deployment of autonomous driving technology through co-creation with TIER IV. The Bridgestone Group has been contributing evolution of mobility by supporting autonomous driving technology globally, these activities are aligned with "Extension: Committed to nonstop mobility and innovation that keeps people and the world moving ahead" in the "Bridgestone E8 Commitment."*4

“Autoware”, whose development is led by TIER IV based in Japan, has all functions necessary to design autonomous driving, and has been conducted a large number of on-site testing for implementation of autonomous driving with safety under various types of environments all over the world. On July 19 2022, TIER IV was adopted by the Green Innovation Fund promoted by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) of Japan, as a research and development project related with autonomous driving.

Bridgestone decided the investment because it can accelerate to develop advanced tire technologies and next-generation mobility solutions by learning from expertise about autonomous driving technology which TIER IV has. These co-creation activities will contribute to the improvement of safety and efficiency of mobility.

TIER IV and Bridgestone will utilize “Bridgestone Innovation Park”*5, Bridgestone’s new global innovation hub whose full-scale operation has started in April 2022 for co-creation. Particularly they will realize agile R&D activities which repeat the process “develop and test immediately” by experiencing and evaluating performance of mobility with autonomous driving in a proving ground “B-Mobility”