WheelRight Ltd - Novel automated off vehicle tread depth and tyre inspection system

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Ensuring commercial fleets maintain road worthy tyres is not an easy task. Managers of largefleets are often responsible for 1000’s of tyres. The penalty for operating a commercialvehicle with non-compliant tyres is £5,000 and three penalty points for each illegal tyre. Theresponsibility falls on the driver and the fleet operator. To run financially viable fleetsmanagers ensure their vehicles are on the road, minimising the time for inspection.Unsurprisingly there is significant potential to improve the management of tyres withincommercial fleets to ensure they are correctly inflated, tread is within the legal limit, baldpatches and cuts and damage to sidewalls are identified. But current manual inspections arecostly, infrequent and often poorly done.WheelRight Ltd has developed a road mounted device which, when driven over by a vehiclewith pneumatically inflated tyres, calculates the pressure in all of the vehicle’s tyres, as wellas measuring vehicle weight and load distribution. This integrated system is in operation withcommercial fleets. The next stage is to integrate automatic inspection of the tyre tread acrossthe circumference of each tyre and the sidewall. It is our goal to make the process of tyreinspection automatic, specific to the tyre, accurate and easy to useThe potential benefit to society from improving tyre maintenance is significant. TheDepartment for Transport report that illegal, defective and under-inflated tyres wereresponsible for more than 1,210 road casualties in Great Britain during 2010. An HGV fleet of50 vehicles used on high mileage motorway routes could save over £650 pa for each vehiclefrom better tyre tread and sidewall inspection. Tyres will no longer be sent to landfill beforetheir operational life is complete.WheelRight technology has the potential to dramatically cut fuel and tyre waste and theassociated carbon emissions and increase road safety.