9:50 am, October 8, 2026
You could say that the dealership of today has undergone such a significant digital transformation in recent years that it’s almost unrecognisable to those businesses from the past. But when it comes to tyres, dealerships and garages are stuck in an earlier era.
That’s the view of technology firm Anyline, which believes that by dragging the process of checking tyres into the digital age could save technicians time, build customer trust and even help dealers sell more tyres.
Before that though, it’s worth taking a moment to realise just how dealerships and garages have adapted to a new technological age.
Customers can book appointments online, computer systems hold digital service histories, and payments can be made without a banknote or credit card in sight. Even the cars are now like ‘computers on wheels’.
Yet within a dealer’s workshop or an independent garage, one of the most routine jobs remains remarkably familiar: checking a vehicle’s tyres.
For many technicians, that still means using a physical tread-depth gauge, taking several measurements and then manually entering the results into another system.
Anyline thinks it is an obvious candidate for digitisation – and believes doing so can offer dealerships benefits well beyond simply saving a few minutes.
Speaking to Car Dealer, Anyline chief product officer Simon Brooks said tyres contain a surprisingly large amount of useful data.
‘Tyres are a really fascinating object when you start to think about it,’ he said in the video posted at the top of this feature.
‘They are huge sources of information. You have a lot of information on the sidewall of the tyre telling you what the tyre is, the make, the model, the DOT number.
‘You can extract so much information from that. And then, of course, you have the condition of the tyre, which you can read into from understanding the shoulder wear or seeing the tread depth.
‘They are attached to modern vehicles, which are basically computers on wheels. So you have this incredibly digital environment with these very analogue objects underneath them.’
Its software operates using the camera on a standard smartphone or tablet, without the need for specialist inspection hardware.
‘We don’t require any additional hardware, any specialised equipment to use our products,’ Brooks explained.
‘We’re purely a piece of software that runs on a mobile phone. People already have tablets and phones on their person or on a workbench and you can just pick that up and use our software immediately.’
Building trust
Convincing experienced technicians to trust software with a job they may have performed manually for decades is, however, another matter.
Brooks argues that the technology is not attempting to make an educated guess about tyre condition. Instead, images captured by the phone are used to make thousands of individual measurements across the tyre. That contrasts with a conventional tread-depth check, where a technician might manually measure a small number of points.
‘We’re taking those visual images that are captured by the mobile phone and we’re making thousands of individual measurements,’ said Brooks.
‘If you have a technician today who’s using a manual gauge, perhaps to measure three points on a tyre, we’re doing that but expanded thousands of times.
‘Then we’re taking the representative values and giving back the information that you would get by using a manual gauge anyway, but we’re doing it digitally.’
The important distinction, Brooks argues, is that digitising the inspection also creates a record that the work has actually taken place.
That record could prove increasingly valuable when workshops are attempting to demonstrate to customers why work needs doing. And, crucially for dealers, Anyline says that can have a direct impact on the bottom line.
Brooks told Car Dealer that dealerships already using its technology are sharing tyre inspection reports and images with customers, allowing motorists to see evidence of tyre condition for themselves.
‘They’re showing evidence of the inspections, the remaining treads on the vehicles, the images that are captured during the process to the customers,’ he said.
‘That’s actually building up a lot of trust with their own customers and helping them to understand better what they need for their vehicle and their tyres.’
This better transparency is resulting in more business for dealers and garages, Brooks said.
He added: ‘As a consequence of that, and a consequence of having more robust and reliable tyre inspections, we also see that tyre sales are increasing at dealerships.
‘Obviously, that’s a really important revenue stream for dealerships.
‘We know from our customers that tyre sales and services around tyres also increase once they’re using the technology.’
Freeing up technicians
The technology also arrives as workshops continue to face pressure around the availability of skilled technicians.
Rather than viewing artificial intelligence as a replacement for those employees, Brooks says Anyline sees it as a way of removing some of the more repetitive work from their day.
‘Everything that we build at Anyline is a tool that has a human user attached to it,’ he said.
‘Our technology certainly is not a replacement, rather it’s something which enables a job like tyre inspection, which can be somewhat tedious.
‘If you think about how you have to write down or type in all of the sidewall information, do the physical manual measurements with a gauge, and then type that into a system, that can really be a tedious job to do.’
Automating more of that process, Brooks believes, allows technicians to devote more of their time to jobs where their expertise is genuinely required.
It could also mean tyre inspections no longer have to be carried out exclusively by highly experienced workshop staff.
Brooks said the aim was to make the inspection simple enough that ‘pretty much anybody who’s on site’ could carry it out, including front-of-house employees, while producing a consistent result that is fed directly into the dealership’s systems.
‘At the end of the day, you’re always going to need to have a decision made,’ Brooks explained.
‘You need somebody who understands tyres and cars to make that decision. That’s not what we are replacing.
‘But in terms of the actual inspection, that’s the area where you can give that to somebody who’s maybe more junior and rely on the result.’
The end result, he argues, is that whoever ultimately talks to the customer about their tyres has better information in front of them.
Elsewhere in the interview, Brooks explains how tyre inspections could become as routine as other digital processes, and how greater transparency can result in more customers agreeing to replacement tyres and related work, thereby improving a dealer’s business.
Watch the full interview at the top of the feature.