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Pirelli Is Launching Smart Tires That Can Monitor Wear and Load

Photo credit: Car and Driver
Photo credit: Car and Driver

From Car and Driver

As more household objects gain sensors and computing power, Wi-Fi–connected refrigerators and Bluetooth toilets will ensconce us in the all-knowing cloud. We’ll never need a text to tell us that we’re low on beer or TP. But the one item too many people ignore until it fails-or, worse, endangers their lives-deserves to be even more connected than it is today. It appears that the humble radial tire will be finding its voice shortly.

Pirelli is among the first tire manufacturers to introduce a truly “smart” tire, which it calls Connesso (Italian for “connected”) for the aftermarket version and Cyber Tire for the variant it’s selling to automakers. The system delivers a richer well of data than the industry-standard tire-pressure monitoring system (TPMS), which transmits real-time readings to the car’s CAN bus and displays tire pressures and sometimes temperatures on your dash. Pirelli’s smart tire certainly can do that, but instead of mounting pressure sensors to each wheel’s air valve, it embeds a combination sensor in each tire’s inner wall that measures pressure, temperature, and vertical load. That’s only the start.

Photo credit: Car and Driver
Photo credit: Car and Driver

Connesso uses a thin, round chip sized like a silver-dollar pancake. At 2.4 inches in diameter and weighing only 0.3 ounce, each unit incorporates a small battery and data storage in addition to pressure and temperature sensors. While TPMS communicates over short-range radio frequencies at either 315 or 433 MHz, Connesso talks with Bluetooth. As such, it can beam data to the car or a paired smartphone running an app. Pirelli claims the sensor is “married” into the tread lining using a special adhesive and doesn’t inhibit tire performance.

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Luigi Staccoli, Pirelli’s executive vice president of its new Digital division, used Ferrari FXX K owners as the first test subjects. After refinements, Pirelli offered the technology to several luxury automakers that are about to launch it on certain models (Staccoli wouldn’t say, but the list of six-figure cars fitted with P Zeros isn’t long). By next year, Pirelli will license the technology to every tiremaker and introduce a retrofit system using an external Bluetooth receiver that anyone can install with a set of compatible tires. But just as rubber compounds are a tire company’s most closely guarded formula, software algorithms are Pirelli’s new secret sauce.

Pirelli has developed an algorithm to use the data from the embedded sensor to estimate each tire’s tread wear and total mileage, as well as the vertical load. That means the tires can warn the driver if an axle is overloaded and when the tires are due for replacement. For electric vehicles, said Staccoli, the vertical-load measurement-which affects a tire’s rolling resistance-will help improve in-car estimates for battery range.

Photo credit: Car and Driver
Photo credit: Car and Driver

Connesso and Cyber Tire also store each tire’s exact model, size, type, and even its last saved position (for example, front left) to make new fitments or rotations a snap. Currently, even the savviest performance cars like the Porsche Panamera require the driver to select manually among multiple sizes and types of factory tires. With Pirelli’s setup, once the tires pair to the car’s computer, the car automatically adjusts to the recommended speed and pressure settings. But automakers can go further. By downloading each individual tire’s load, wear, and temperature, engineers have yet more data points to fine-tune a car’s stability control, braking, adaptive suspension, and other systems.

Which brings the inevitable question: What else is Pirelli doing with this data? Staccoli says it’s not interested in selling troves of tire information to third parties, but the company will share the info with automakers, who will conceivably find more reasons to lure you into their service bays. The tech isn’t cheap, either. Pirelli estimates Connesso will add between 25 and 30 percent more per tire (for a set of P Zeros, that could be hundreds of dollars), which will make it extremely tough to make inroads in the aftermarket. And unlike TPMS, these sensors aren’t replaceable and aren’t expected to last as long. Although they power down into a sleep state while the car is parked, Pirelli expects a useful life of only three years. Long-term reliability is questionable.

Regardless, the smart tire is upon us. We’ll predict right now that having an intimate connection with your car tires will prove more useful to everyday life than the inevitable smart kitchen spatula.

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