New Technology for Tires Could Save the Lives of Millions

SnapSkan Saves the Day

According to a study of the safety-related aspects of tire usage, 25 percent of tire-related accidents happen because the tire’s tread depth is below the minimum level. Unfortunately, many motorists aren’t too concerned about the condition of their tires. It’s not so much that they aren’t aware of how important good tires are to driving safety, but more a matter of their inability to keep track of how daily wear and tear can grind through the rubber.

To that end, Nokian, a Finnish tire manufacturer, is introducing technology that can “raise drivers’ awareness of the condition of their tires by making it as easy to access as possible.”

SnapSkan is a service designed to inform car owners about the condition of their tires by tracking and measuring tread depth and safety via 3D scanning technology. As they explain on their website, the driver just needs to drive over a scanner that reads the tires. At the same time, a camera will identify the vehicle by its registration number. After the scan, the driver can choose to receive a free report of their tire information via text or email.

 

Smarter Road Safety

Car manufacturers go to great lengths to ensure driver and passenger safety by developing software and hardware designed to save lives in case of accidents. Despite all these efforts, a vehicle’s overlooked tires could still cause devastating problems, so Nokian’s efforts to digitize tire monitoring thus becomes a welcome and much-needed service that will hopefully promote road safety in the easiest and simplest way possible.

"There is a big change ahead for our industry in the near future. Until now, the tire sector has lagged clearly behind other industries in terms of digitalization. It is high time to harness technology to serve motorists with regard to their tires," says Nokian Tyres' President and CEO Ari Lehtoranta.

For now, SnapSkan is only available in Finland, but the company expects to roll the service out to other countries in the coming years, at which point it will join the growing number of "smart" driving technologies poised to make driving safer than ever. With everything from AI products that can converse with drivers to cars that can converse with each other in development, this smart transportation trend is only going to become more ubiquitous in the future.