Continental is working on a tyre tread depth monitor
We like to keep you up to date with as many motorvehicle-related advancements and technological breakthroughs as possible and today we’ll be looking at the tyre company Continental who has been working on a tyre tread depth monitor, which to be honest, is one particular area we weren’t really expecting an advancement.
The work has been going on for a while because they’re planning to roll it into production tyres from 2017 onwards. Instead of measuring tread wear visually, as a human would, this technology will be using the sensors that the company’s tyre pressure monitor system already uses. So basically we’re talking about a software update.
According to the company the software will be capable of detecting gradual changes in an individual tyre’s rolling characteristics and then will determine the level of tread wear by comparing the most recent information it gathers with an on-board store of data amassed during the company’s testing.
Once a tyre passes the company’s pre-determined threshold amount of wear, the software will start alerting the driver via a light in the instrument cluster and quite possibly a warning message on the trip computer screen. Continental suggests that vehicles fitted with a telematics system can even alert the local service centre or dealership that your car needs a tyre change.
Even after this technology is implemented, tyres will still feature tread wear indicators so that drivers and authorities can perform quick visual inspections without having to rely on gathering data from the sensors.
The great idea behind this technology isn’t as much what it does – although that’s pretty interesting and useful – but how it does it, by using already existing monitoring technologies.
The new technology doesn’t have a specific release date yet, however they tentatively stated to make it available starting with 2017.
