In 2020, defective tires caused 4,350 car crashes in Texas alone, including 85 fatal crashes and nearly 700 injury crashes. It’s clear that proper tire management is critical for fleets, dealers, and drivers alike to maintain safety on our roadways.

Tire Alerts in Real Time

Revvo Technologies, which offers an AI-driven tire management solution, provides fleets data into tire tread, pressure, temperature, and critical issues remotely and in real-time by sending alerts and reports when inspections or actions on tires are required.

Revvo leverages an artificial intelligence engine called TireIQ to process, analyze, and deliver insights through its web dashboard, app, SMS, email, and API integrations with telematics and fleet software solutions like Geotab and Fleetio. Tire data is generated through Revvo’s offerings:

• Revvo PRO, a patented sensor mounted in the tire, provides data from every revolution of a tire including tread (<1/32”), pressure, temperature, load, road surface, and alignment. 

• Revvo LITE, a telematics-only data solution developed for light-duty vehicle applications that use TireIQ’s machine learning models (developed over 50 million miles of tire revolutions).

To date, Revvo has seen a 90% reduction in tire-causing downtime, a 50% increase in operational efficiency, over 10% increase in tire life, and an 11% return on investment, according to Sunjay Dodani, CEO and co-founder. Revvo has measured this impact from tires used by autonomous vehicles, last-mile delivery vans, mid-mile trucks, Class 8 trucks and trailers, and specialty vehicles.

Record Tread Depth Instantaneously

Measuring tire tread depth is important for safety, but it’s been a manual undertaking. Bridgestone Americas’ Last Mile Tire System automates the process using a digital tread reader that measures tread depth on each tire when vehicles roll over it.

Digital tread readings provide data to optimize when the tire should be changed — staying within DOT depth regulations of 2/32^nd of an inch yet conserving fleet budget if there is enough tread depth left on the tire. Analyzing tread data will also help fleets understand unusual wear patterns and act accordingly.

The Bridgestone system will dispatch service automatically when low tread depth is detected. Bridgestone offers the service overnight so fleet managers don’t have to take a vehicle off the road.

A pay-as-you-go model allows fleets to only pay for tire use, better aligning a delivery fleet’s expenses to revenue. The service is optimized for delivery fleets, though other fleet types can use the system, Bridgestone says.

Another tire tread detection solution is from Tyrata’s IntelliTread Drive-Over System and Tyrata.io platform. Its new feature creates digital tire profiles of every tire in the fleet and automatically alerts fleet managers when the wear is uneven or mismatched so tires can be rotated.

Tread Readings Go Mobile

Leveraging new technology to keep drivers safe, Discount Tire introduced a mobile tire tread depth reader in 2021 with Zebra Technologies. It launched across 1,100 stores to help ensure customers receive accurate tire readings.

Mobile tire tread depth readers are one of many technological advancements from the tire retailer, which also includes Treadwell, an online tool to personalize tire-buying decisions. Discount Tire’s website and mobile app make it easy for customers to reduce in-store wait times by as much as 30% when they buy and book online.

Using Smartphones and OCR for Tire Health

Collecting tire data can be a tedious and potentially error-prone manual process, such as writing information down on paper or adding it to an Excel spreadsheet. Now, mobile data capture technology automates the process using optical character recognition (OCR) technology. OCR takes images of words, characters, or numbers — from a tire’s sidewall, for instance — and transfers them to machine-encoded text. Users just need a mobile phone to scan data in.

Anyline’s OCR scanning device associates optical information from the tire with images documenting the health of the tire. So, a technician could identify tread wear, tire cuts, and small cracks and decide what needs fixing now or record them for future attention. The digital record would more easily help the next technician that works on the vehicle to have that information at hand.

“Having all tire-related information, such as the age, tread depth, tire size, wear, and tire history in one digital spot allows drivers to access all necessary information at their fingertips,” Lukas Kinigadner, CEO and founder of Anyline, said. “By giving drivers the option of checking tires with their own mobile phones, drivers can know when their tires need to be replaced, scan tires to see if a tear existed previously or is new, and can compare tires instantly to online tire recall lists.”