Tactile Mobility adds depth to connected tire technology

Tactile Mobility, a tactile data and virtual sensing technology company, recently launched a first-of-its-kind tire tread depth measurement solution that can enhance driver and passenger safety.

"The magic is that it's a software solution, so the OEM doesn't need to install a new computer," said Yagil Tzur, vice president of product development at Tactile Mobility. "(They are) sensors that take data from existing hardware and calculate very sophisticated insights, like the grip level that the vehicle is experiencing at each point in time."

This is important because there are some tire properties that affect car safety that are not being monitored electronically. The Tactile Mobility team started to see these gaps in tire technology and safety.

"We are not tire experts and even not vehicle dynamic experts," Tzur said.

"We come from different technology domains, mainly signal processing and machine learning, and we actually discovered that the tire industry is incredible. It's very complex with a lot of opportunities. When we started to analyze this market, we learned that there are major gaps."

For instance, a driver does not have any indication of tire tread depth, and this problem becomes more severe with the progress of electric cars, Tzur said. Electric cars are expected to wear tires faster, and with increasing service intervals.

Tread depth is of the utmost importance for vehicle safety because it increases a vehicle's ability to grip the road, brake efficiently on wet surfaces and avoid aquaplaning. Ultimately, it ensures driver and passenger safety. Yet the only tire safety measures that are monitored automatically and then presented to a driver are air pressure and temperature.

"We all know that we have TPMS in the cars, but there is no system that measures tread depths or that measures the tire stiffness or age, or that checks that the tire type is correct for the weather or temperature," Tzur said.

"Our specialty is to accurately measure the vehicle surface dynamics," he added.

Tactile Mobility gathers the information from existing data, such as wheel speed, wheel angle and RPM. Tire tread depth data is relevant for OEMs, Tier 1s, fleet managers, repair shops, insurance companies and everyday drivers.

"This can potentially become a new TPMS," said Tzur.

OEM focus to start

Tactile Mobility will focus on OEMs to start, in part because "it takes some considerable effort to adapt the solution into different platforms," Tzur said.

The current technology fully meets each and every passenger car model and also light truck.

Since the tire tread depth measurement solution is a safety-related solution, it needs to be accurate. This is easy to achieve when working with an OEM directly, Tzur added.

"Tactile Mobility started this aftermarket device company and we focused initially on the heavy trucks market to develop solutions for optimizing fuel consumption and then pivoted to OEMs," Tzur said.

The company has the knowledge and the ability to provide this solution to OEMs and aftermarket, but is starting with OEMs. "We believe this will help us to bring this excellent product to fulfill the vision globally, quickly and effectively," Tzur said.

While Tactile Mobility previously focused on optimizing fuel consumption as it saw oil prices starting to drop, it needed to find another commercial business case to fulfill its commercial target, Tzur said.

When the company shifted to its current focus, it approached a few different OEMs, including BMW, which Tzur credits as one of the most advanced OEMs in terms of innovation. BMW is planning to implement Tactile Mobility virtual sensors in their vehicles.

"We are looking forward to working with them to develop new capabilities," Tzur said.

Additionally, Tactile Mobility is collaborating with six other OEMs and Tier 1s, including Porsche and Nexteer Automotive. The company said it has executed partnerships with 10 road authorities and municipalities across the globe, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Israel, Singapore and Detroit.

Shift in focus

Beyond its tire tread depth initiative, Tactile Mobility is developing a comprehensive suite of automated tire health monitoring capabilities, which addresses all major tire conditions affecting vehicle safety.

One of the biggest reasons why this new kind of technology is vital is because of the significant imbalance between the research and industry data on new tires, compared to what exists for used tires.

"If you look at car population over the world, most of them, of course, don't have new tires," Tzur said. "So we started to analyze what we can do with our expertise and we came up with the concept called Tire Health, which is actually a solution encompassing many different virtual sensors, which will look at stiffness, tire type mismatch, tire blowout prediction and tire surface response.

"Some of them are already in the last stages of development and some of them are in advanced research, but we believe that we will be able to bring this vision to cars worldwide and have a huge impact on safety."

In parallel, Tactile Mobility is starting to build the capability to aggregate data from cars to provide rich data sets that can be used by tire companies to track tire performance in terms of stiffness and grip. Tzur said they do this by analyzing information over time by region, by different driver style and weather conditions.

"We believe these are the building blocks providing innovative data in the car that will enhance the safety, actually provide proactive safety to cars," Tzur added. "And on the other end, providing very rich data to tire companies and being able to increase the reliability and safety (can) have a very positive impact on this industry."