If you live in Canada, this year’s set of snow tires might be installed by a robot.
San Francisco startup PitPro Automation said Wednesday that it has installed its first automatic tire-changing system at a tire shop in Calgary, Alberta. The startup says its robotic system, first revealed last year, can swap a full set of four tires in under 15 minutes. The first deployment is at a Kal Tire location — one of Canada’s largest independent tire service chains.
PitPro is one of myriad startups trying to disrupt different parts of the car ownership experience. While founder and CEO Jeremy Conrad told TechCrunch he ultimately wants to move into other kinds of automated maintenance, he thinks there’s big opportunity to build a business around tires in the near term.
Changing tires is “backbreaking” work, and tire shops are facing a major labor shortage, he said in an interview. Even when shops can find people for the job, he said, those workers often leave within a few months to a year.
“One shop manager was telling me they had to get special permission to pay more because a Panda Express opened across the street and it took about half their employees,” he said.
PitPro’s system is designed to slide right into existing maintenance bays. It features two boxy robots, each roughly the size of an oven, that use a mix of sensors and a robotic arm to locate and loosen the lug nuts. The robots store the lug nuts, pull off each wheel, and replace it with a new or rotated tire.
PitPro has, to date, mostly talked up plans to deploy its tire-changing robots with commercial fleets. It’s still focused on that line of business, Conrad said, and the startup has former Ford Pro executive Ted Cannis as an adviser. (“He’s got relationships with basically kind of every major fleet in the United States, and he’s you know been very helpful in making introductions for us on that,” Conrad said.)
But Conrad believes tire chains are a major opportunity as well, not just because of the labor shortage, but because of the constant demand for tire changes — especially in Canada, where switching to and from winter tires is a yearly occurrence for most car owners.
Conrad said PitPro is focused on chains, rather than smaller shops, since they tend to have standardized layouts and offer greater potential for wider deployment down the road. On top of that, mechanics can still use the bay that PitPro’s tech occupies for other maintenance, increasing the chance that shops will be willing to try it out, Conrad said.
The shift to real-world deployment has had its challenges, according to Conrad. Tire shops tend to operate with the bay doors open, which exposes PitPro’s robots to all kinds of dust, debris, and weather. The startup had to account for all that, not only to keep the system robust, but also to make sure the sensors maintain an accurate view of the tires.
Not everything is a challenge, though. During the interview, Conrad shared a photo from the Calgary installation showing where the robots had been almost completely covered in an unexpected substance: dandelion seeds.
“We looked into it, and it’s not going to be a problem for us,” Conrad laughed. “But it’s just like… I had never thought about that we might need to deal with a dust cloud of dandelions.”
