AKRON — Goodyear is teaming up with Prazo Inc., an electric car subscription company doing business as "Borrow," to help it forecast and schedule needed tire maintenance and replacement on a timely basis.
"Goodyear is focused on the future of mobility with a strong emphasis on fleets and electric vehicles," Chris Helsel, Goodyear's chief technology officer, said. "This relationship with Borrow continues our testing of digital service solutions for consumer fleets, allowing Goodyear to lead in this space."
West Hollywood, Calif.-based Borrow has 80 customers so far but said it is on track to have 750 cars on the road by year-end.
Goodyear said its focus is to service the fleet's tires, as well as provide additional services in order to maximize Borrow's uptime and customer experience. Goodyear is using its Goodyear Mobile Tire Shop vans to service Borrow's customers' vehicles, with the potential to include its company-owned retail stores and aligned dealer network the pilot progresses.
"Goodyear is using its unique predictive tire-servicing solution for connected fleets to forecast and automatically schedule needed tire maintenance and replacement," Goodyear said in announcing the partnership.
"Leveraging Goodyear's expertise in tires, the cloud-based platform predicts and automatically schedules tire servicing via vehicle data and proprietary algorithms."
For Goodyear, the relationship represents more than a sale of its predictive fleet technology; it also gives the company a larger laboratory to continue developing that and similar products.
The company said its Goodyear's Innovation Lab in San Francisco will test its technology while servicing the Borrow fleet.
Borrow offers customers subscriptions that allow them to lease an electric vehicle for three, six or nine months, with some high-end vehicles in its stable.