By Isabelle Bousquette
Self-driving fleets are escorting record numbers of passengers around cities like Phoenix and San Francisco. But that isn't the case in frigid Midwest outposts like Akron, Ohio, home to tire company Goodyear, where hands remain firmly on the steering wheel.
"Snow really changes that condition of the road to control the vehicle," said Chris Helsel, senior vice president of global operations and chief technology at Goodyear Tire & Rubber.
The crux of the issue, Helsel said, is automated emergency braking systems, designed to stop vehicles when they detect an object like a pedestrian or another car. Coming to a full stop takes longer on snowy, icy roads, and today's autonomous vehicles struggle to account for that, he said. He believes tires could help.
That hasn't been a problem for the self-driving fleets operated by Alphabet's Waymo, navigating the ice-free streets of places like San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix.
But with ridership climbing -- Waymo was doing more than 100,000 paid rides a week as of October -- and companies like Tesla and Amazon advancing their own technologies, the expectation is that self-driving cars won't forever remain restricted to snowless climes.
Now, Goodyear said it is rolling out new tech that uses information about the type and make of the tires plus weather information pulled off vehicle cameras to predict exactly how long it would take to brake in certain conditions.
Goodyear unveiled a prototype Tuesday at CES in partnership with Dutch research organization TNO. It is the latest addition to Goodyear's Tire Intelligence platform, SightLine.
"Without a person in the system who's a trained driver with lots of experience, the system really doesn't know. And the [braking] system just assumes, well, it's a dry road," Helsel said. "So it's really important you have the real conditions presented to the system. And that's the innovation part that we've done here."
Bad weather and its innate unpredictability has always been a hard problem for self-driving cars to solve, said Raj Rajkumar, a professor in the electrical and computer engineering department at Carnegie Mellon University. But it is one the tire manufacturers could be in a good position to help solve, he said. Even if self-driving cars could find other means of gauging road and weather conditions, only the tires know how old or worn they are and how long it might take them to brake, he said.
Helsel said the tool taps into existing data sources on the vehicle, such as front and rear cameras, as well as third-party weather information to help determine road conditions. It then takes into account the model and age of the tire to create an accurate prediction for how soon a car should start braking at a given moment.
Goodyear could create an even more accurate prediction if the tires in question were embedded with Goodyear sensors to gauge road friction, but he added there are still challenges with connecting those small devices to reliable power sources.
Helsel said he expects to market the technology to both autonomous vehicle companies as well as legacy car manufacturers, fueled in part by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's 2029 mandate for all vehicles to have automated emergency braking systems.
Write to Isabelle Bousquette at isabelle.bousquette@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 09, 2025 07:00 ET (12:00 GMT)
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