You don’t need anybody else to tell you that maintaining correct tire inflation pressure across a fleet of trucks and trailers is a challenge of biblical proportions. Even if road damage and punctures weren’t an issue, a tire will lose a couple of pounds of pressure a month through osmosis. Pick up a nail or a bit of steel somewhere and a tire could drop to half its operating pressure in less than a day — if it’s not completely ruined.

If your drivers aren’t diligent in their trip inspections, a leaker may go unnoticed and could eventually become another of the thousands of chunks of rubber littering the highways.

If only that was all you had to worry about.

Soft tires play havoc with fuel economy too, they’re prone to irregular wear, miles-per-thou are reduced dramatically, and casing values suffer as well. Then there are roadside service calls, outrageously expensive replacements, downtime, service failures, loss of customer confidence, unhappy drivers.

What would you pay to make all that go away? At the risk of oversimplifying the equation, a tire-pressure monitoring system (TPMS) can relieve much of your tire-related stress — but only if you’re informed and in a position to do something about it.

Real-time feedback on low-pressure events is a quantum leap from pleading with drivers to do real tire checks — even occasionally — but what good is all that information if it’s provided only to the driver?

Visual warnings such as blinking lights or wheel-mounted gauges are useful, provided your drivers are willing to take the next steps — like airing up the tire and checking for the cause of the low-pressure warning — but what if they just won’t take the next step?

Carl Tapp, vice-president of maintenance at P.A.M. Transport of Tontitown, Ark., says he sees drivers split into two camps here.

One — the prudent ones — will stop and attempt to rectify the problem. The other — average drivers — will place tape over the light and keep going. 

AIR Apparent: T-RAC from Trans Technologies provides tire
inflation and deflation capacity along with visual dual-tire pressure

"I don’t want to leave that decision up to the driver," Tapp says. "He has nothing in the tire, but he knows that stopping will cost him time and money, and maybe a missed appointment. I need to know that I have a tire issue so I can advise the driver how to proceed."

Get the Message Out:

TPMS with telematic data transfer capability hands control of the situation over to dispatch and the maintenance department. Tapp says when alerted to a problem, he can locate a suitable repair facility en route, advise them that a truck’s coming in, and can instruct the driver to have the tire repaired.

"Sounds simple enough," Tapp says, "But there have been hurdles to jump over getting here. We’re still having trouble getting the monitoring systems talking to the inflation systems."

Tapp worked with the Meritor Tire Inflation System (MTIS) by PSI and Qualcomm to establish the link, but until now, there was still one element missing; info on the damaged tire.

"We can alert the driver and send him to a repair facility, but when he arrives, we have no idea which tire is running low because the MTIS is keeping up the pressure," notes Tapp. "I want the inflation system working to save the tire, and the monitoring system telling us which tire is bad. We’re still trying to get the inflation people talking to the monitoring people."

As these two technologies have evolved, it seems they’ve been on opposite sides of the building. Actually, getting data from the truck to the terminal isn’t the challenge; the stumbling block has been creating a place for the data to land.

Phil Zaroor, CEO of Advantage PressurePro, says there is a lack of back-end software written for tire-management systems. While that information can be transmitted, you can’t do anything with it until the software applications are written.

"Of some 22 telematics providers we work with, only seven have written software applications to accept the tire-pressure info and document it," he points out. "Those applications can provide useful tire-management information, such as how often it was low, how often it needed to be filled, how well it performed, how long it held up, tire wear, tire problems, etc."

TireVigil by Tire Stamp is one such provider of tire management data. The cellular-based system can upload data right to your office servers, giving you near-instant updates on tire condition.

Tire pressure monitoring systems make manual
tire checks a chore of the past.

Naturally, only the faults would be of interest, but TireVigil can also ping every tire in the fleet on a daily basis as part of a fleet tire survey. And don’t forget to ask about backward compatibility. You don’t want existing platforms rendered redundant by development on this front.

Take Control of Pressure:

When you consider everything associated with a tire or wheel-end failure, the potential costs are staggering. From lost driver productivity and utilization to the raw tire and repair costs, right up to the fines levied by some shippers for service failures, you have a pretty compelling case for staying right on top of your tires and wheel-ends.

I say wheel-ends here because of the potential built into some TPMS systems for out-of-normal temperature warnings (think brakes, bearings, etc.).

A simple red blinking light might not be enough to target the difficulty. On the other hand, a five-psi pressure drop caused by a change in ambient temperature might be more than the driver needs to know about.

The fleet can filter and sort incoming data and advise the driver of what needs to be done. Pushing those decisions upstairs takes the responsibility off the drivers’ shoulders, advises Frank Sonzala, vice-president of sales and marketing at Pressure Systems International. "It gives the fleet some leverage in choosing the right course of action."

Data transfer capability, and tire-management applications are with us now, to some degree, as are inflation and monitoring systems.

What’s missing is integration, but that’s beginning to happen. If fleets keep driving these problems back to the manufacturers, and they can figure out how to make a little money off the problem, it looks like tire management might actually become less onerous as we move forward.