ORLANDO, Florida—Aperia Technologies’ predictive tire analytics platform now covers trucks and trailers.
The Burlingame, California-based tire management company unveiled Halo Trailer Connect—which uniquely expands its active tire inflation hardware and predictive maintenance software to all wheel positions—and introduced the Halo Tire Management platform Feb. 27 during a presentation for trade press at the Technology & Maintenance Council’s 2023 Annual Meeting.
“Our clients are now able to put every tire on every asset under management with Halo Tire Management,” said Judith Monte, vice president of marketing and customer service.
Like its tractor counterpart, Halo Trailer Connect uses machine learning to assess overall tire and wheel-end health, detect potential issues by tire position, and classify them by severity. The system identifies tires that are reaching the end of their life, leaking, or may benefit from an updated cold inflation pressure target. It considers “infinite” interrelated and competing variables, such as user goals and risk profiles, to “affect, inform, and customize” tire-related maintenance recommendations and fleet decisions, the company said.
Aperia, which also celebrated 1 million tires under management, already is working with key customers, according to Josh Carter, Aperia’s CEO. It started accepting pre-orders at TMC for the full Halo Trailer Connect rollout, which is expected in the third quarter. “When we launch, we launch, so we want to make sure we’re ready to go, and Q3 is that time,” Carter said.
Effective tire management
Monte said Halo Trailer Connect delivers management “excellence” in three key categories: Tire pressure management, data and analytics, and seamless reporting. “Without all three, effective tire management is just not possible,” she said.
Tire pressure management is the “foundation” of the program. “While fleets spend billions of dollars every single year manually managing tires, underinflated tires leading to blowouts still is the leading cause of fleet downtime,” Monte said. “Commodity products like tire pressure monitoring push pressure alerts to fleets—so many alerts with so little insight that they require an army of people to figure out how to action them, which inevitably means most problem tires never actually get addressed.”
Halo’s tire inflator is the only active pressure management tool for both tractors and trailers, she emphasized, providing “meaningful” fuel, tire life, and uptime benefits.
The system also “gathers and interprets” data at the wheel end.
“While other systems gather and report, we know that bombarding fleets with more data from commodity sensors is not effective,” Monte said. “Instead, Halo Connect’s proprietary tire analytics engine receives data from a whole host of sources—then does the heavy lifting of decoding the data and translating it into meaningful maintenance recommendations for fleet users.”
By extending Halo Connect to trailers, Aperia now manages more tires than any other platform with an analytics engine that is “smarter, more accurate and generally incomparable to anything else in the industry today,” Monte added. Halo Trailer Connect also is flexible and customizable; and can be used as a standalone analytics platform, or with any other trailer inflation system.
“[And] all Halo Connect purchases for trailer applications come standard with asset tracking,” Monte said. “So now, not only can fleets effectively manage their tires, they can locate them as well.”
Comprehensive maintenance solution
Halo Tire Management targets three aspects of tire maintenance, Halo said:
- Tire pressure management: The platform automates tire pressure adjustments for consistent, fleet-wide performance. With pressure automation by Halo, fleets can eliminate more than 70% of tire touches fleetwide, Halo said.
- Tire analytics: Where other systems deliver data overload with threshold-based alerts, Halo Tire Management provides clear insight into tire health from cradle-to-grave, including uncovering tire leaks and their severity, determining how much safe drivetime is left before service is required, and tire damage accumulated before retreading.
- Seamless integrations: With the ability to integrate into any number of platforms, the Halo Tire Management platform is customizable and integrates seamlessly into fleet workflows. Whether using the “intuitive” out-of-the-box portal, tying into existing telematics, maintenance or driver tools, or even the vehicle CAN network, Halo Tire Management helps maximize value.
“Halo Tire Management delivers fleets the most value for each unique application,” Monte said in a news release. “Whether a fleet needs to automate tire pressure, detect tire leaks, or assess tire tread, load, and vibration, Aperia will customize a solution to address each unique set of challenges.”
