SmartBay AI Robot Halves Tire Service Time
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- SmartBay cuts tire service time from about 75 minutes to as little as 30 minutes and lets one technician manage up to three bays simultaneously, handling up to 24 tires per hour versus four under the current human-only workflow.
- Automated Tire Inc. (ATI) leases the system to dealerships and tire shops for $4,900 per month (~$60,000 a year), which the company says is less than hiring an experienced technician and delivers roughly triple the efficiency.
- Founder Andy Chalofsky, a fourth-generation tire entrepreneur, previously built Traction Tire into a $100 million wholesale distributor (sold to a private equity firm in 2018) and grew online marketplace SimpleTire to nearly $1 billion in sales before it was acquired by Dealer Tire, a Bain Capital portfolio company.
- SmartBay's AI adapts to each vehicle rather than following fixed routines, collecting and analyzing data that ATI says can generate real-time insights shared across its network of dealerships and auto service shops.
- Tire service demand is accelerating partly because EV tires need more frequent replacement, even as service shops struggle to hire technicians — the labor gap Chalofsky says convinced him installation was the next piece of the tire industry to overhaul.
Why it matters: For dealerships and tire shops, the $4,900/month lease undercuts the cost of an experienced technician while tripling throughput per worker — a direct pitch to an industry that's losing mechanics just as EV-driven tire replacement is boosting demand. The downside: a job long done by humans is the one now being automated, and Chalofsky's framing leaves out what happens to the technicians who can't be reassigned to supervising three robot bays.
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