Conti promoting technology side of tire maintenance

UVALDE, Texas—Continental Tire the Americas is flexing its technology muscles by releasing updated tire-tracking technology to help fleets save money.

Tire dealers have a crucial role in this mission, Conti officials said during a recent ContiExperience event for fleets and the media at its Uvalde proving grounds, where the company showcased some of its fleet technology and testing.

"At Continental we believe that in the B2B space, we are shifting to a digitalization model where connected products and services are the key to fleet efficiency and profitability," Shaun Uys, head of Continental U.S. market truck tires replacement, said.

"Our intelligent digital solutions are the future of tire management and allow us to partner with the fleet and the tire dealer to adapt to specific customer needs and not an 'off-the-shelf' product. This is exactly what fleets are seeking today."

Carolina Wagner, marketing director for commercial vehicle tires, said Conti has been talking with fleets and creating "feedback loops." She told Tire Business that sometimes fleets don't specifically ask for a particular technology, yet Conti will work on a solution to help address a need.

"The key piece of it is how to learn to listen actively for what is the customer's pain point, to go beyond what they are actually telling you and try to identify what is really the root cause, what is the pain point," she said.

"And then it's a matter of prioritization. We have to listen to our customers on how things are performing, listen for their pain points and to put everything together and then bring that back into the company and say, 'I need that because this is actually going to help my customer achieve something,' in opposition to, 'This is a good idea.' "

In March, Conti launched ContiConnect Live, a cloud-based digital tire-monitoring solution that allows long-haul fleets to monitor all their vehicles in real time.

ContiConnect Live is a further development of the ContiConnect Yard digital tire-monitoring platform that debuted in North America in 2018 for fleets whose vehicles return to a central yard.

The system works in concert with Continental tires equipped with the company's ContiPressureCheck sensor.

About 200-plus fleets in the U.S. are using a ContiConnect system so far, according to Wagner.

Conti also introduced its Gen II sensors, mounted to the inner liner of the tire, to monitor tire pressure, temperature, mileage estimation and battery life, and features Bluetooth connectivity.

Later this year Conti plans to release a pair of "Generation 5" truck tires—the HSR5 regional all-position and HDR5 drive-axle—that will be sensor-ready with the option for an embedded RFID tag, enabling a fleet to know the make/model, serial number, unique identification number and size of the tire. It's an option that will help fleets improve tire asset management and track the total life cycle of the tire, Conti said.

"When a tire is enabled with Continental digital technology such as Gen II sensor and RFID tag, the tire becomes an object for life with complete tracking for maintenance, retreading and transparency for fleet managers," Uys said.

The tire maker is also developing an app that will help the user monitor tire tread depth and wear.

Tires are Continental's primary aftermarket product, but account for less than 30 percent of what the company produces, which include many parts and systems within a vehicle, some primarily for the OE market.

"In large part, Continental is a technology company, a vehicle technology company," Trey Thompson, field engineering manager for digital solutions for Conti truck tires, said.

Thompson noted that 85 percent of tire failures start as a slow leak, so they are preventable when the leak is addressed immediately. The goal of tire monitoring is to identify issues with tires before they become a major problem.

While the ContiConnect Yard is geared to domicile fleets whose trucks return to a lot every night, such as cement, construction, city bus and waste-haul fleets, the ContiConnect Live services long-haul and regional fleets whose trucks do not return to a central location frequently.

Conti touts this as a solution that provides GPS asset tracking to improve fuel efficiency, extend tire life, reduce labor costs equated with manual tire inspections, detect missing/stolen tires and reduce tire failure.

Tire sensors collect data from inside the tires and forward that information to a telematics unit or Bluetooth dongle and driver app. The data are transmitted to the ContiConnect web portal in real time, where the information can then be viewed on a computer or mobile device.

In the fall, the company said it will introduce ContiConnect Live Stand-alone Trailer, a solution for trailers that are parked and not connected to a cab, in a "drop and hook" environment.

The battery-powered device will allow unhooked trailers to be monitored in real-time for up to a month for GPS location, mileage estimation, tire pressure and temperature data.

Tire issues can be addressed without waiting for the trailer to return to the depot.

The trailer system has a sensor that turns on every 24 hours and sends tire-pressure information and GPS location. The sensor functions for at least 30 days until the battery needs recharging.

With this feature a fleet manager can see where each trailer is parked and know the tire pressures on each wheel.

Stolen or missing tires can be detected when the sensors are read and their location determined, Conti noted.

When the trailer is hooked up to a tractor, the sensor batteries automatically start recharging and begin running off the vehicle power. They will then send information every five minutes when the vehicle is moving.

The Gen II sensor, like its Gen I predecessor, can be moved from tire to tire for as long as the sensor battery lasts, which is expected to be a minimum of four years/400,000 miles, Conti said.

The Gen II battery has a shorter life than its predecessor's because of its added ability to connect to Bluetooth, Conti said. The sensor costs $40 but can be rolled into packages with the ContiConnect system.

The sensor readings are sent to the web portal of ContiConnect, which generates notifications for the customer and collects historical information.

In addition to measuring pressure and temperature, the Gen II sensor features a mileage counter to provide tire comparisons, a battery-life indicator, two ways to communicate (via radio frequency or Bluetooth) and an accelerometer which detects when the tire is rotating so as to turn off Bluetooth access and preserve battery life.

Unlike the Gen I sensor, the Gen II and future sensors only require a firmware update to add functionalities, Conti said.

The Gen II sensor can be an aftermarket installation or installed at the tire factory, per customer request, Conti said.

Thompson said Conti is developing an app that allows a customer to use a phone to take a 3D photo of a tire tread and then analyze the image for irregular wear and identify an inflation or alignment problem.

The app will be able to recognize the tire sensor's serial number and send the data to ContiConnect to match with the right wheel position and vehicle automatically.

Introduced in 2019, the ContiConnect Yard platform collects information through a telematics tracking system to provide the condition of tires on the trucks and trailers as they return to the fleet's lot each day.

As a vehicle passes a Yard station reader, data are collected on the tires' pressure and temperature, and the sensor information is transmitted to the IoT platform.

The system enables fleets to detect an immediate or pending issue and address it while the tires are in the yard.

Conti has long had the ability to connect its TPMS sensors with a telematics provider, but its Live monitoring doesn't require Conti to interface with a telematics provider, the executives said.

Customers can log into the ContiConnect portal and view both Yard and Live connected-vehicle data.

"We're in this commercial trucking business for one purpose and one purpose only, that is to move something from point A to point B. …," Thompson said.

"At the end of day that's all these fleets get paid for is to move something from A to B. If they're not doing that, they're sitting on the side of the road waiting on someone to call to come out and replace a tire and then they're not making money," he said, noting that a road service call can cost a fleet an average $1,000 per incident.

According to the Technology & Maintenance Council of the American Trucking Associations, a tire that is underinflated (10 percent under optimum pressure) translates to:

• 15 percent less tread life (like paying 15 percent more for your tires, Thompson said);
• 20 percent shorter casing life (basically losing one retreading due to casing failure, Thompson noted); and
• 1 percent extra fuel consumption. "One percent of a diesel fuel bill for a month, for a year, for our customers is a big deal," Thompson said.

"For any fleet, I will argue it doesn't matter the size and it doesn't matter the vocation of the fleet, … two of the top three monthly expenses for any of our customers is fuel and tires," he said.

Wagner admitted the ContiConnect Live system is more expensive than the Yard system—Live costs about $500 for hardware and the monthly service varies between $10 to $40 per truck, depending on the package and payment option; the Yard reader has a monthly subscription of $350.

If a truck can avoid a costly roadside service call, however, the investment pays off, she said.

"They are not competitive solutions, they are tailored for different vocations," Wagner said. "If you have a fleet that needs the Live solution, why not? And definitely the cost the fleet is paying, it's by far worth it and compensated by the savings they're going to get. They'll see that from the very first couple of months by utilizing that, mainly by the downtime they avoid and then everything else, like fuel efficiency, GPS tracking location and all those types of benefits."

"The Live solution costs a little bit more, but the potential savings is much greater, too," Thompson added.

The ultimate ContiConnect customer is the fleet, "but the dealer has a crucial part, plays a crucial part. They provide the services for the fleets ...," Wagner said.

"We have multiple ways to get the dealer involved. They can get their fleets, the fleets we don't have access to necessarily—it's the fleets that are their customers—and then they can push the system to them. And then they can become a re-seller of the hardware but also the re-seller of the services behind that.

"So now there's a whole new business model or revenue stream that opens up for them. They need to change their business model, which is then the challenge. They're seeing that, 'I have a role in this,' and their role is really to help the fleets, to keep their up time, to sell the service, to sell the preventative maintenance services, to help them configure the business to configure the systems, to keep up the systems—which is something many fleets struggle many times with," she said.

For example, dealers can have a mobile Yard reader on the back of their service trucks and offer the monitoring service for their fleet customers. If given fleet permission, the dealers can also manage the tracking system for their customers.

"There are models where they are purely re-sellers of the hardware. There are models where they benefit in generating additional services and providing the services to their fleets. So that's how we're including more and more of the dealers into this space of digital tire monitoring," Wagner said.