Pirelli’s sensor-embedded Cyber Tire is starting to find a whole new niche helping traffic agencies. When we first learned of the smart tire, it was making its debut fitted to McLaren’s then-new plug-in hybrid supercar. As an alternative to a tire pressure monitoring system fitted to the car’s wheels, the Cyber Tire wirelessly reports its temperature and pressure to its car via Bluetooth Low Energy, along with some specific information about the tire itself.
Since then, Pirelli has continued to develop the technology. When it created Cyber Tires for the Pagani Utopia, it allowed a car to tailor its antilock braking and electronic stability control to the specific rubber fitted to the wheels. Right now, a car’s ABS or ESC will be tuned regardless of the tires it’s fitted to.
But a high-performance summer tire acts quite differently from a winter tire, not just because of the composition of the rubber but also due to the tread pattern, depth, and stiffness, not to mention factors like sidewall stiffness. And the Utopia can take advantage of that fact.
So far, that’s an academic concern to everyone but the few with the means and desire to drive a Utopia. But last year, Bosch, which worked on the Pagani integration with Pirelli, signed a deal with the tire maker allowing it to do the same for its other OEM clients. Indeed, just last month, Aston Martin announced it would adopt the Cyber Tire.
“There are plenty that I cannot yet mention now that are in an advanced phase of proof of concept,” said Piero Misani, Pirelli’s CTO. At first, Pirelli used its own AMG demo car to show the system to OEMs, but more recently, it has been integrating the technology into several new OEMs. Pirelli is “already working with two projects in Europe and two projects in China, for example, and this will lead to another one in England, Korea. We will start in January, and this will lead for sure to effective projects in the future,” Misani told me.