An AI tire robot changes rubber without removing wheels from the car. SmartBay promises faster service as shops struggle to hire technicians. Plenty of questions remain about its functionality and effectiveness. There’s a new product hoping to become a quiet helper the next time you need new tires. Called the SmartBay, it’s an AI-powered robot that does just about everything a tire technician can do, but with almost no help from a human. If it takes off, it promises to speed up tire-changing appointments, increase consistency, and perhaps improve safety at the shop and on the road in the process. At the same time, there are a lot of questions worth sorting out between now and whenever shops decide whether or not to pull the trigger on this new AI robot. How It Works Automatic Tire Inc, a Boston-based robotics company, is the brand behind SmartBay. Andy Chalofsky, CEO of Automated Tire, Inc., explains the process: “The car is lifted just as it would be on a conventional lift, but instead of taking off the lug nuts, disturbing the tire pressure monitoring system, and pulling the wheel, SmartBay dismounts the tire directly from the rim while the rim stays on the car.” In fact, the system can do even more than that. Read: Pirelli’s Tires Already Have Sensors In The Rubber, Now They’re Adding AI Eyes Too Evidently, it can balance the new tire on the wheel once it’s installed. It can cut wheel weights as light as 0.1 oz, which is exceptional from a balance and waste perspective. A camera provides insights to the technician about the state of the brake system as well. Leasing the machine costs $4,900 per month, or nearly $59,000 a year, which ATI says is still less than hiring a dedicated tire technician. That math depends on which tire technician you’re comparing to. National averages range from about $17 an hour at entry level to $24 an hour for experienced techs at established chains, according to PayScale, ZipRecruiter, and Glassdoor. At the low end, a full-time tire tech earns roughly $35,000 a year. At the high end, closer to $50,000. That puts a full-time tech well under the $59,000 SmartBay lease, but ATI could also be accounting for benefits, training, and the cost of turnover, not just the hourly wage. SmartBay Shop Efficiency The pitch to shops isn’t about replacing people necessarily. It’s about speeding up the process. “Rather than relying on a technician to manually remove the wheel, dismount the tire, balance it on traditional equipment, and reinstall everything, SmartBay performs the tire change and wheel balance itself with only light-touch oversight from an operator,” Chalofsky told Fox News. Reducing the workload on a single vehicle potentially frees up a technician to work on multiple SmartBays for shops that have them. ATI says that one person can, in theory, handle three bays at once while the machines do most of the laborious work. “A single technician can run two or three SmartBays in parallel, processing roughly 24 tires an hour compared to about four tires in 75 minutes today,” Chalofsky told Fox News. In Chalofsky’s view, it also eliminates the issue so many shops face when it comes to being shorthanded. “Anyone who has spent time in a tire shop knows how quickly a busy day can fall apart: a technician calls in sick, the first car of the morning takes longer than expected, and the appointments stacked behind it back up the entire schedule,” Chalofsky said. The Other Side Of The Tire There are plenty of questions worth asking here. For example, what are the system’s limitations? Plenty of customers today want big 33 or 35-inch tires. Will those fit in the ATI cradle system? Those tires can each weigh in excess of 40 pounds, and by the looks of it, techs will need to lift and set the tire in the system. Granted, they already lift and lower the same tires, with wheels attached, but there’s a catch. When lifting or lowering a large wheel and tire, most techs stand directly in front of it and perform the movement similarly to the way one would do a back squat at a gym. Based on a promotional video from ATI, techs appear to reach over the side of the tire changing apparatus to load or remove tires. That could introduce a new type of strain and potential injury. Three Bays, One Tech, One Problem Chalofsky’s claims about how this fixes shops that end up short-handed don’t seem to hold much water either. If one tech can manage three SmartBays it’s not as if shops will hire extra folks to stand around. So when that tech calls out for whatever reason, you don’t have one bay down; you have three bays down. Three very expensive bays at that, and there’s another catch. SmartBay isn’t something a shop can buy once and own for good. They’re all offered through a lease model. That’s right, it’s akin to a subscription model but ATI says it works out because it’s cheaper than just a single tire technician. According to Fox News, “The company says its initial machines are targeting a 45-minute door-to-door tire change for four tires, mounted and balanced. As the technology learns more, that time could be reduced to 30 minutes.” In my experience as a tire shop manager, I can see the potential benefits and concerns here. One good tech can do a full set of four tires in around 30 minutes, provided everything goes smoothly. They absolutely cannot do three sets in that same 30-ish minute timespan. If ATI’s SmartBay really is wildly reliable without much downtime, it could very well save shops’ overhead and improve service times. Some Questions Raised That said, there are other things to consider. How does it handle low-profile tires? How does the balancing system work? Does a technician have to leave the car in neutral on the lift? What safety protocols are in place to allow the balancing to happen without increasing the risk of the car coming off the lift? We tried to call ATI at its public-facing phone number, but only an AI chatbot answered the phone. It couldn’t answer any of these questions and allowed us to leave a message. The company doesn’t have a publicly available email address either, so we reached out to its PR firm. Some Answers Given After we wrote the piece, ATI did respond with a few heavily shrouded answers. It said it can’t share information about how the balancing system works because it’s proprietary. “ATI is not disclosing the specific vehicle-disposition requirements because they are part of the company’s proprietary operating process. SmartBay is designed, however, to be used in a standard 12-foot service bay with a guided workflow that enables technicians to prepare the vehicle safely and consistently before automation begins.” Regarding compatibility, it tells Carscoops that “SmartBay is designed to service tires from 14 to 24 inches, which covers the overwhelming majority of the modern consumer tire market. Like any automated system, it is optimized around high-volume, real-world service center use cases rather than niche applications such as extreme off-road tires or highly specialized supercar setups.” Put another way, there’s no need to worry about technicians needing to lift heavy 33 or 35-inch tires because the system can’t handle them anyway. Lead image ATI