If tires could talk, they could demand more respect.
Maybe you would stop underinflating and wearing them out. Or they could warn you of a nail in the tread that will cause the tire pressure warning light to come on in a few days. They can even help you drive better, stop earlier and get better gas mileage.
Smart tire technology like this one is already in use, with tire manufacturers adding special sensors to certain tires. And eventually, these technologies will become widespread, said TJ Campbell, tire information and testing manager at online retailer Tire Rack, because the information that tires can provide is so crucial.
“I definitely envision that,” he said, “if, for no other reason than that, he’s the foundation of fully autonomous driving.”
Self-driving cars will have enough random variables to contend with without unexpected tire problems, he said. The more warned of a potential problem, such as an air leak or worn treads, the better. A self-driving car will also not feel like an experienced human driver if the road surface is slippery or a car is about to skid. Automated tire technologies will be able to detect impending loss of traction faster and more accurately than the stability control and traction control systems used on most cars today.
While smart tire technologies are available, they are typically used on very expensive performance tires or in commercial vehicle fleets where fleet managers try to save every penny.
Changes in temperature and air pressure can have a major impact on how tires, and therefore cars, perform on a track. Cold tires may have less grip than warmer tires. Meanwhile, tires that are over-inflated have less contact with the asphalt, while tires that are too low are not firm enough to provide good control.
Performance of another sorting is even more important for the 14-foot tall tires used on mining trucks These massive tires can cost $ 50,000 each and are used on trucks the size of a modest two-story suburban house.
“They run those activities 24/7,” said Brian Goldstine, president of mobility solutions and fleet management at Bridgestone Americas. “And they are trying to maximize the payload and speed of those vehicles in the mine.”
Sensors in the huge tires transmit information that can be combined with other data coming from inside the truck, such as how fast it is moving or how hard it is spinning, to get a sense of how the tires are coping with the pressures rather than to rely on predetermined rules.
“So they don’t have to use more general industry standards for how fast the trucks can go or how much cargo,” he said. “We give them real-time data from the real world.”
Tire companies also offer this type of technology for more modest commercial fleet operations, such as for vans. As with mining trucks, the information is from The sensors in the tires can help fleet managers save money and keep the trucks working during critical business hours.
For these types of operations, Bridgestone often uses sensors that simply screw onto the valve stem. These sensors cannot do as much as that embedded in the band, but they can still pass on critical information, Goldstine said.
“Today, for example, [there is] the ability to spot a slow leak as it happens before the tire reaches that critical threshold, which could lead to an emergency or a critical situation, ”he said.
Most passenger cars today already have tire pressure monitoring systems that can warn when a tire is low on air. But most of the time, these low-pressure warnings don’t come up until it’s close to a crisis. By measuring air pressure more directly, smart tires can give more accurate readings to detect when air is lost, even very gradually, to provide earlier and more accurate warnings.
Smart tires can also detect when traction is lost in some situations. Pirelli’s CyberTire could do this on wet roads by measuring, as the tire rolls, how much the tread bends against the road surface, said Pierangelo Misani, the Italian tire manufacturer’s head of research and development. If the tread does not bend much, it means that it is running on water and loses contact with the solid road surface.
Detecting profile wear is complicated because these sensors cannot measure profile depth directly. In general, tire manufacturers are working on solutions that measure tire wear by comparing how a tire is used – how many miles driven, how many hard stops, etc. – or how it bends or vibrates and comparing that with data collected from the same type of tire in tests.
“We have some wheel speed. We have some information about vibration. We have some information about footprint length and … other characteristics of the tire,” said Chris Hela, senior vice president of global operations and Chief Technology Officer Goodyear. ‘From there we can see your wear and tear down to a millimeter.’
Drive better
Smart tires can also help make so-called “driver assistance systems” work better.
Modern cars already have automated stability control systems as required by US regulations. These systems detect when a vehicle starts to skid and bring it back into line by braking briefly on specific individual wheels. Systems that detect traction loss from within the tire itself can help cars respond faster and better, tire manufacturers say.
The same goes for anti-lock braking systems, or ABS, another safety system already on modern cars. These systems ‘pump’ the brakes quickly to prevent them from stopping – locking – the wheels too quickly, causing the tires to slip on the road surface. As tires wear, smart tire systems can automatically adjust ABS computers in the car as the tread wears out, tire manufacturers say.
“We have shown that we can recover 30% of the braking distance loss that comes from new versus worn tires,” said Goodyear’s Hela.
However, before these systems can be used on a large scale, some kind of standardization is needed. Tire companies will have to work together so that all their sensors communicate in a similar “language,” Campbell said.
This means that a car does not always have to use the same brand of tires for its entire life. Customers want choice, Campbell said. Nothing but If these systems are interchangeable, he said, the tires on most people’s cars will start talking.