Pirelli’s Cyber Tire might become highway agencies’ newest assistant

Pirelli’s sensor-embedded Cyber Tire is starting to find a whole new niche helping traffic agencies. When we first learned of the smart tire, it was making its debut fitted to McLaren’s then-new plug-in hybrid supercar. As an alternative to a tire pressure monitoring system fitted to the car’s wheels, the Cyber Tire wirelessly reports its temperature and pressure to its car via Bluetooth Low Energy, along with some specific information about the tire itself.

Since then, Pirelli has continued to develop the technology. When it created Cyber Tires for the Pagani Utopia, it allowed a car to tailor its antilock braking and electronic stability control to the specific rubber fitted to the wheels. Right now, a car’s ABS or ESC will be tuned regardless of the tires it’s fitted to.

But a high-performance summer tire acts quite differently from a winter tire, not just because of the composition of the rubber but also due to the tread pattern, depth, and stiffness, not to mention factors like sidewall stiffness. And the Utopia can take advantage of that fact.

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