How Data Capture Helps Dealers With Tire Registrations Laws

1. How have tire registration laws changed in the past years?

Until recently, regulations stated that manufacturer-owned tire distributors and dealers needed to record the names and addresses of anyone who bought or leased their tires. They were also required to have standardized paper forms for this purpose.

Independent distributors and dealers had to make sure anyone buying the tires received standardized registration forms, which had to be filled out and sent to the manufacturer. Many purchasers did not send those forms, which led to inefficient tire recall procedures for tires sold by independent dealers.

Independent tire dealers in the US

In 2019 Independent tire dealers account for approximately 63% of the U.S. consumer tire retail market, according to Modern Tire Dealer. Out of these dealerships, the top100 independent tire retailers and distributors in the U.S. together own more than 7000 outlets across the country.
With that portion of the tire market not strictly required to perform throughout tire registration, many tires ended up unrecorded, or wrongly recorded.

The FAST act

On December 3, 2015, the US Congress passed the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act, or FAST Act. The FAST act requires independent distributors or dealers of tires to maintain records of:

• the name and address of tire purchasers and lessors,
• the DOT TIN identifying the tire that was purchased or leased.

The act also requires them to ensure they can securely transmit these tire records electronically to the manufacturers.

3. What comes between dealers and tire registration today?

If tire registration is no joking matter in regard to the law and risks, both for tire users and for tires sellers, it is not always easy for dealers and distributors to deliver 100% valid registrations.

Human error

There are many challenges to recording the DOT TIN and transmitting it to manufacturers, and the human factor is one of the main. Human errors, such as typos or mistakes when transcribing DOTs play a big role and as many as 40% of all DOT registration records end up being invalid, and thus useless.

These errors are mainly due to the fact DOTs are long series of characters, often transcribed in an environment of poor light, dirt, grease and dust, by technicians pressed for time.

Time-consuming activity

The average time to locate and record TINs from all four tires of a vehicle was 2 minutes and 43 seconds. The maximum time for a single vehicle was 5 minutes and 45 seconds when DOT codes were facing inward.

It is time spent by technicians that cannot be used to perform tasks that add value for dealers nor customers.

4. How can data capture streamline tire registration?

Data capture, and in particular Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technologies are ways to directly scan a series of characters, codes,… and use the digitized data onto computers or digital systems.

In the case of tire registration, data capture and OCR can be used to scan the DOT code of each tire that has to be registered. This technology has many advantages for tire retailers and distributors:

• It’s very fast – each DOT can be scanned instantly.
• It’s 99.9% accurate – there is no chance for the DOT to be misread nor mistyped.
• It’s already digitized – the data can be used directly on a computer.
• It’s practical – OCR technology can be used on mobile devices or mobile phones. It can also be used without an internet connection.
• It’s easy to integrate – Anyline’s mobile SDK for DOT scanning is natively developed for iOS, Android, and UWP, also supports common integration frameworks such as Xamarin, Cordova and React Native.