While walking the floor at the 2025 CES in Las Vegas in January, it was apparent that artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing everything.
From a dog bed that monitors vitals and offers therapy to a city filled with personal flying saucers (seriously), the future is all about data.
Or, more importantly, the future is about how we gather data and how AI is the key to make sense of it all.
CES, formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show, is held annually at the start of the year in Las Vegas. It's the spot where the tech world comes to debut innovative products and concepts.
For years, I've heard from those who have gone to the show how much CES is about mobility, and it makes sense.
Autonomous vehicle navigation is key to the autonomous future, and because of the safety aspect, it is also one of the most complicated. Companies from around the world are working to solve the problems.
So, Tire Business decided to cover the event this year. We learned that tire-tracking is the next frontier, and also there's a whole lot of new terms to learn.
Most of the technology shown at CES boils down to gathering a lot of data and using AI to help make real-time decisions. Ultimately, these technologies will be the reason a delivery drone may be commonplace or your kids ride to school in an driverless bus.
While the autonomous future still is years away, CES showed that there are plenty of practical applications for these technologies today.
Several companies are utilizing data tracking in tires to manage vehicle fleets.
Inside the Jan. 27 issue, we have stories on how Sumitomo Rubber, Cerebrum and BANF have systems that can gather thousands of data points a second from a single tire, process that data and supply usable information and alerts to vehicle fleet managers. The result is a huge increase in safety and efficiency. Fleet managers will know in real-time just about every aspect of the vehicle, which leads to less downtime and longer life of tires, among many other benefits.
Another company, Regom, is leveraging AI technology to sort end-of-life tires, a job that previously was done by hand. The French company's system requires only one operator to make final decisions on tires. One of the first systems the company built now processes 5 million tires a year.
CES also offered up plenty of new terminology:
• AV: Get used to hearing "AV," a lot — as in autonomous vehicle. (And here, we're still getting used the EV.)
• TMS: Tire Monitoring System (TMS) is the more accurate term — excluding the "Pressure" of TPMS — for these new technologies which can monitor a tire's pressure, wear, load, damage and other things, like loose lug nuts.
• Indirect TPMS: Companies, like Sumitomo, use software that uses readily available data from brake ECUs to measure pressure without an additional sensor in the tire.
• Software-defined vehicle: This is the future where software can operate a vehicle autonomously with optimal safety and efficiency.
While it seems like the future of super smart "robots" capable of doing human jobs is actually upon us, the practical application is much more nuanced and far less terrifying as movies would have us believe. It's really about using data to make good decisions.
So take comfort, the future will be really efficient through no fault of our own.