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