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Step aside, smart highways and smart traffic lights. Tires are getting wise, too.
Goodyear Tire & Rubber and Bridgestone are introducing tires with sensors that communicate with algorithms trained up on machine learning to monitor tires’ wear, air pressure, temperature, vibration, the condition of the roads a tire has been rubbing against, and other factors.
Artificial intelligence in the companies’ cloud then analyzes and interprets the data to give vehicle owners a forecast on when a particular tire might fail.
In a test of 1,000 fleet vehicles owned by 20 companies, Goodyear’s “Sightline” technology was able to accurately predict looming tire problems 90 percent of the time, often days in advance, the company said.
Bridgestone’s version also can tell whether a tire with worn treads is hardy enough to retread instead of replace, reducing costs.
The systems are being marketed to “last mile” delivery fleet owners, such as Amazon, UPS, and the U.S. Postal Service.
These fleet vehicles can wear out four sets of tires a year. Knowing how to optimize wear minimizes expenses and knowing to change out a tire before it goes flat in a customer’s driveway saves time and boosts productivity.
TRENDPOST: “Smart tires” are another demonstration of the ways in which technology can replace human time and expertise in vehicle operations. But don’t expect smart tires to be standard equipment in new cars. The technology is data-intensive and costly enough that it will only make financial sense for fleets and others for whom minimizing vehicle downtime maximizes profit.