Tyrata Inc., a tire sensor and data management company, has opened an office in Germany to manage sales, distribution and service for its IntelliTread Drive-Over System (DOS) in Europe. DOS meets the need for low-cost, easy-to-deploy tread wear monitoring in commercial fleet depots and enables growth of the tires-as-a-service offering where tire manufacturers sell tires on a “per mile” basis. The company shipped its first DOS to a major tire manufacturer in Europe for testing and qualification before scale-up and deployment to depot customers in the region.

Tread wear monitoring is becoming a critical element in the tires-as-a-service business model. The IntelliTread Drive-Over System (DOS) collects tire wear data when a vehicle drives over a speed-bump-like unit and provides the user with actionable, cloud-based tire data analytics in real time. The system is fully automated and optimizes the tire management process by determining the optimal time to maintain tires in a fleet. The DOS system reduces risk for the operator and significantly improves efficiency, which leads to higher customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention, and increased profits for both the fleet operator and the manufacturer.

Vehicles or tires can be identified through RFID solutions from FineLine Technologies enabling the IntelliTread Data Analytics to monitor, track, analyze and report vehicle- and tire-specific tread depth via the DOS. 

“We see an increased market need for an automated, low-cost, tire monitoring and tracking solution,” said Jan Svoboda, director of RFID Business Development at FineLine Technologies. “DOS is such a solution and once deployed it will play a critical role in enabling the next generation of tire sales and maintenance business models for fleet owners and operators.”

The first customer engagement in Europe represents a major milestone for the DOS platform. Earlier this year, Tyrata successfully completed extensive testing at the Durham, North Carolina, City Transit Company, where buses were tagged with RFID technology to correlate tread-depth information of each individual tire as part of an asset management system. Due to COVID restrictions, product installation in Europe will be done entirely remotely with the customer, and the system will be managed and monitored remotely by Tyrata from its Durham headquarters, demonstrating ease of install and use of the product. Successful qualification of the product in large-scale depot operations in Europe will signal the beginning of scale manufacturing in 2021 to satisfy initial demand for the system.

“We are excited to open our European office to give us a firm foundation to build and support our customer base there,” said Luka Lojk, Tyrata’s vice president of sales and marketing. “Europe’s aggressive push for a tire-as-a-service business model represents an important market for Tyrata.”