How might RFID technology for tires progress?
- Jason Roanhouse, director of strategic business development, Bridgestone Commercial Group: “We see the tire industry looking at a variety of technologies and partnerships to provide our customers with better information around tire performance. Some of the opportunities are obvious, such as avoiding downtime from tire failures and inflation management.
“Other opportunities and insights will come from combining numerous data points on the truck with tire information to further improve fuel economy, contribute to the future of trucking, improve safety and continue to drive out costs in an ever more competitive industry.”
- Kevin Rohlwing, senior vice president of training, Tire Industry Association: “Before the technology evolves, it has to be implemented, and I think we are a long way from RFID tags becoming commonplace in the truck tire market.
“The most obvious area for evolution would be the ability to program the chip to reflect repairs and retreads, but the costs associated with this type of functionality would have to be offset by the benefits. Fleets will have to be willing to pay more for the technology, so there has to be an obvious savings.
“If there is some way to combine RFID with TPMS, then you would have something, but it has to be robust enough to withstand the retread process.
“RFID has the potential to be a great thing for the truck tire market,” he surmises, “but the demand from the fleet side isn’t there yet, so the tire manufacturers are not going to jump in until it becomes widely accepted.”
- Maxine Osborne, director, Michelin Services Operations, Michelin Americas Truck Tires: “The technology has been around for decades. Miniaturization will increase capabilities for storing information. RFID readers will improve their reading distance and the ability to distinguish between multiple tags.
“In the near future, our fleet customers will enjoy benefits such as the ability to track the complete lifecycle of each tire they purchase from Michelin.” That information will verify the value of tires and “will also be able to provide savings to the customer by pinpointing and even predicting when a tire needs to be retreaded or replaced.”
- Peggy J. Fisher, president, TireStamp: The technology “will most likely evolve so that the tag can take pressure and temperature in the tire and transmit that along with its identification number. It won’t be long before TPMS 2.0 systems will be able to read RFIDs, temperature and pressure and communicate this information off the vehicle for storage and analysis in the Cloud.
“The big thing is that this technology will eventually be widely utilized by tire manufacturers. Wide adoption will drive down the cost of RFIDs and make them readily available to fleets who will then take advantage of the benefits this technology will provide, which should optimize tire selection, improve tire maintenance and reduce tire costs per mile.
