Tire Technology Expo 2025 in Hannover, Germany, celebrated its 25th anniversary by bringing together over 240 exhibitors and more than 165 conference speakers from 55 countries. This year, it showcased innovation, sustainability, digitalization, and regulatory challenges.

Attendees could engage with material innovations and testing methodologies, cutting-edge simulation techniques, advanced tire mechanics, and performance, gaining insights into the industry’s future.

The prestigious Tire Technology International Awards honored advancements in tire manufacturing innovation, environmental impact, and product design.

Two dominant themes emerged across the expo: sustainability and safety. Safety is closely intertwined with tire digitalization, with automation becoming more widespread across the automotive industry.

Michelin and Rockwell Automation presented the tire Digital Product Passport, an EU-funded project to provide full traceability throughout a tire’s lifecycle.

Goodyear’s Kanwar Bharat Singh spoke about the company’s SightLine concept of connected technology, which obtains road condition and tire monitoring data directly from the tires and shares valuable information with drivers, vehicle controls, fleet operators, and municipalities.

SightLine leverages advanced sensing and fusion technologies that enhance the performance and safety of ADAS and automated driving applications. A modern vehicle relies on information from hundreds of sensors and dozens of systems integrated into its control for assistance or autonomous driving operation. However, it is necessary to obtain information from the tire sensors. Tires directly interact with the road, unlike cameras, lidar, and radar, which rely on visual data and often struggle in adverse weather conditions.

A simple example is Adaptive Cruise Control. Relying on sensor data, the system maintains an optimal distance from the vehicle ahead. While cruise control driving mode is gaining popularity, it has one serious shortcoming. Current solutions lack actual information about the tire-road grip; it is calculated indirectly during braking, so they do not recognize when the surface condition changes. Imagine precipitation, black ice, or other factors impacting the road surface and tire grip, but the vehicle systems do not always understand it correctly. This poses a safety risk.

The future use of autonomous vehicles poses even more safety challenges for road condition monitoring. Autonomous fleets must have zero accidents; otherwise, they are not allowed on the road.

Solving this problem is not trivial. Over the last two decades, researchers have tried various ways of estimating the tire-road friction coefficient in real time. Among several methods, the frequency response of tire vibrations provides the most accurate capability to assess the tire-road friction coefficient. But no practical solution has been implemented for the mass market. This is because tire vibrations generate high volumes of data that cannot be transferred effectively to the vehicle controls.

POLYN’s VibroSense TMS (Tire Monitoring Solution) helps solve the long-standing problem. A standard TPMS integrated with the ultra-low-power VibroSense TMS chip creates a new opportunity for next-generation AI-driven intelligent tires. VibroSense TMS provides friction estimation in the tire and allows transmission of only its changes in microseconds of time, using microwatts of power.

This solution, recently made available as an Evaluation Kit for customer testing, significantly improves the stopping distance of a vehicle equipped with intelligent tires.