This startup wants a robot to change your tires

Getting your car’s tires changed is the automotive service equivalent of getting a root canal.

That’s how Andy Chalofsky, CEO of newly launched AI and robotics company Automated Tire, Inc., or ATI, thinks of it—and why he and his fellow co-founders decided to use an emerging technology to disrupt a process that’s historically been cumbersome, time-consuming, and physically demanding.

“While the auto industry has made great strides with advanced technologies over recent decades, automotive service bays have seen little innovation to match,” Chalofsky said in a statement Tuesday announcing ATI’s emergence from stealth.

“Most notably, electric vehicles wear through tires up to 30% faster,” he added. “The proliferation of EVs creates significantly more tire service opportunities, but tire technician jobs are dirty, injury-prone, and difficult to fill.”

Get smart: Enter SmartBay, ATI’s platform that uses robotics, machine learning, and computer vision to automate services including tire changes, wheel balancing, and vehicle inspections. The startup touts SmartBay as a way to increase repair shops’ efficiency, improve the customer experience, and help solve a nagging automotive technician shortage.

Here’s how it works: Once a vehicle is in position, the platform automatically begins an inspection. It analyzes tire and wheel conditions while gathering diagnostic data. “The robotic system then executes the tire change and wheel balancing process, removing and reinstalling tires with consistent accuracy while simultaneously calculating and applying precise wheel weights to ensure optimal balance,” according to a news release.

According to ATI, SmartBay allows one technician to manage up to three service bays at a time, reducing the time for a full tire service job by half. The product fits within a standard 12-foot service bay.

So tire-d: Chalofsky represents the fourth generation of his family to work in the tire business. He started working in tire distribution and went on to establish an online tire retailer that he later sold. In 2020, he said, he started to think about the next industry challenge he wanted to focus on.

“We just saw that there was a real need in installation, and tire changing and wheel balancing,” he told us. “It’s not a very pleasurable customer experience. We would talk to the shops and the shops would oftentimes talk about how hard it was to get labor.”

ATI cited a report from the National Automotive Dealers Association identifying a shortage of 37,000 automotive service technicians. This shortage affects drivers, ATI argued, by leading to “inconsistent service quality and even more grueling wait times.”

“We’re making not only that technician more efficient—we’re making them more profitable for them and the shop. And we’re also making it an easier job with a lower threshold of skill,” Chalofsky said. “You’re now taking the workforce and you’re allowing them to fill in the gap a little bit and do a job they’d actually rather do.”

He noted that repair shops and dealers employ highly skilled mechanics who are trained to work on vehicles that are becoming ever more complex. Rather than having these skilled workers do tire changes and vehicle inspections, they can focus on more lucrative and specialized service jobs.

“By segmenting that work, we’re allowing those…technicians to really focus on the more complicated vehicles and the more complicated problems,” Chalofsky said.

Problem, meet solution: Chalofsky believes that starting with a problem, then devising a solution, differentiates ATI’s approach from other tech startups.

“The most common tech story is these smart people that are into robotics or into engineering. They’re solving problems, and then they’re taking it to an industry to try to get a product-market fit,” he said. “The thing that defines us is the opposite: We have robotics and engineering talent, of course, but are really founded with deep automotive tire expertise. And we focused on solving a problem and bringing engineering to that problem, rather than engineering and then trying to bring the industry to the problem.”