13 Feb 2025
After Decades of Development, Tire and RFID Industries Prepare for New Growth
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For decades, RFID technology has quietly evolved, embedding itself in industries where precision and durability matter most. Now, as the tire industry prepares for rapid expansion, RFID is playing a critical role in sustainability, traceability, and performance tracking. From motorsports to mining, RFID tags are transforming the way tires are identified, managed, and optimized for performance.
Tires aren’t intended to last forever as they are exposed to heat, cold, pressure, cuts and punctures. As a car’s tires age, they undergo physical and chemical changes. And for the past two decades, tire manufacturers and RFID companies have been injecting relatively sensitive mechanical devices into this environment to track those changes.
The question has been how robust are the tags and will they compromise the tires at all? Development and testing found the technology has not impacted the integrity of the tire itself and can sustain up to a 1 million kilometer life of some commercial tires.
IoT firm Hana RFID has been part of that effort since the early days. Over the past 20-plus years, Hana has offered new products with a goal to provide flexibility to the automotive and tire industries as they are poised for growth into passenger vehicle tires.
New Offering from Hana RFID
Early on, there was little awareness as to whether RFID tagging of tires would even work. When tire manufacturers began embedding RFID tags into the sidewalls of their products, they needed to test whether the tags could sustain the heat and pressure of the vulcanization process. They then needed to see if the tag could hold up throughout the rigors a tire is exposed to in its life, all the way to recycling. [...]
“As the demand for tire traceability and quality pedigree rose, some of the first real-world applications of our embeddable tire tags emerged in the high-performance world of racing—where precision, reliability, and data-driven insights make all the difference,” said John Erdmann, CEO of Hana Technologies. “Since 2006, our technology has been used in NASCAR, followed by the British Touring Car Championship in 2008, Formula E in 2014, MotoGP in 2016, and other elite racing categories.”
Tracking Tires for Sustainability
The tire industry has recognized the value of embeddable tire tags as a data carrier for the Digital Product Passport (DPP), the EU’s pending mandate to track a product from production to recycling. In 2019, the international standard ISO 20910 formalized general requirements and data structure for coding RFID tire tags. This standard delivers a common tag numbering and identifier system that all tire manufacturers can use, paving the way for more universal expansion.
Michelin, Bridgestone, Continental, Goodyear, and Pirelli together founded the Global Data Service Organization for Tires and Automotive Components (GDSO) in early 2022. The organization’s goal is to digitally standardize tire data and provide a common platform for all tire manufacturers to access and exchange data. [...]
