Truck Tyre Theft: How A Mobile Tyre Serial Number Scanner Can Help
Truck tyres represent one of the main costs for fleet owners: the typical semi-truck, counting its trailers, comes with up to 18 wheels, and each tyre usually costs around 300€ – but that can go up to 1000€ per tyre for specific uses. On average, that’s a total of 5300€ in tyres per truck.
This high value makes truck tyres a target for thieves. What’s more, the difficulty of tracking them makes commercial tyres easy to sell on the black market.
In this blog, we will explain how new technologies like OCR and mobile tyre serial number scanning can help fleet owners to prevent truck tyre theft. When it does occur, the same technology can also help to retrieve them.
Jump to key topics
Jump to key topics
1. Why your truck tyres might not be secured
One of the main issues with this growing problem is that it’s fairly easy for experienced thieves to steal truck tyres. In less than 30 minutes, a coordinated small group can strip a truck off its tyres and be on the run. So increasing your yard security might be the first step to prevent theft. One way to do that is to monitor entrances of your premises with ID and license plate checking.
A security staff member can visually inspect IDs of the people coming in and out or the vehicles’ license plates. However, this method lacks efficiency:
- It’s time-consuming to do a thorough inspection. One must take the person’s ID, type his/her name or information on a computer or a device to check if the person has access credentials.
- It leaves room for mistakes. When entering or registering yard entrants’ IDs, a security guard can make mistakes like typos or mistranscription.
- If entrants are only registered on a paper-based document, the data needs to be entered in a digitized system later on, which is once again time-consuming and generates additional mistakes. Also, such documents can be damaged (by manipulations or by the weather) or be lost.
2. Increasing your yard security with OCR
Optical Character Recognition is a technology that allows a computer to recognize printed and handwritten characters and use that information in a digitized system. It works with any device that is equipped with a digital camera, such as a smartphone or tablet.
OCR can be leveraged to streamline the entrants identification process:
- IDs can be scanned using a smartphone to record the identity of entrants, or check if they have credentials to access your yard.
- License plates can be scanned the same way when vehicles enter or exit your yard.
Automating these processes with OCR technology comes with a huge advantage when it comes to yard security: it’s fast and it’s accurate. There is no risk that the information recorded is incorrect or gets lost.
3. Transportation companies are also witnessing a new form of theft
In addition to “traditional” tyre theft, where drivers or owners find their truck laying on cinder blocks, another kind of theft is becoming more common these days and concerns mostly trailers. With many trucking companies only owning tractors and renting trailers, some trailer leasing businesses have found out that their new, high-end tyres have been swapped to worn out cheap tyres without their knowledge.
What usually happens is that a client takes a trailer for a job out of the country, swaps good tyres for bad ones, and sells the stolen tyres for profit. Upon the trailer being returned, it can be tricky to notice that tyres have been swapped, and to prove that the tyres equipped are not the ones originally installed.
Obviously, this kind of theft isn’t limited to rental trailers. Transportation companies owning their trailers have seen a similar scenario: after a journey abroad, the trailer comes back with low-quality tyres equipped instead of the original. The only difference is that, for those cases, the driver can be an accomplice to the theft.
4. The cost of tyre theft for transportation companies
There is an obvious cost to pay when truck wheels go missing: each tyre usually costs between 300 to 500€, and the wheel itself costs an additional 75 to 250€. If a truck and its trailer are both stripped off their wheels, a transportation company can face up to 13500€ in replacement alone.
But as truck owners and fleet managers will know, a truck is only making money if it can be on the road, and downtime can be seriously prejudicial to business. Time spent replacing stolen tyres is not spent transporting merchandise, and immobilizing a truck can jeopardize contracts with customers – which could damage a transportation company’s reputation and business.
5. Why it’s difficult to recover stolen truck tyres
One of the reasons thieves are now targeting truck tyres is because they are generally hard to identify. This means that even if the police suspect that someone is selling stolen tyres, it is hard for them to prove that these tyres are in fact stolen.
A step that fleet owners can take to help the recovery of stolen tyre is to record and register their tyre serial number. Available on the sidewall of each tyre, this information, if not unique to each tyre, can help identify each tyre.
Recording tyre serial numbers manually comes with the same problems as checking IDs or license plates: it takes time (especially when you have to record 18 tyre serial numbers per truck!) and it leaves room for errors, which dramatically reduces the chances to recover stolen tyres.
6. Recovering stolen tyres with a mobile tyre serial number scanner
Thankfully, OCR can also help in that regard: as tyres serial numbers are characters moulded on the side of each tyre, they can be read by any device equipped with a camera, when using the right solution. It takes only a few seconds per tyre to scan and record each tyre serial number, which can be automatically recorded to your fleet database with no transcription mistake possible. It can even be linked to each truck, using either its license plate or its VIN (which can also be scanned with OCR technology!).
As the technology works with any device equipped with a camera, you can record your truck TINs with a smartphone or a ruggedised device directly in your yard, with no need for an internet connection and even if tyres are poorly lightened.
Having these thigh records of each tyre within your fleet comes handy when the police recover stolen tyres, as TINs can be compared to see if they are matching.
In addition to that, it becomes easy for trailer leasing companies to make sure the tyres that come back with their equipment are the same as the ones they installed: they can scan each tyre upon return and see if TINs check out with their records.
7. How to integrate a mobile tyre serial number reader
Anyline’s mobile data capture solutions offer an effective and efficient way to scan tyre identification numbers from any camera-enabled mobile device. They can be used in all types of adverse conditions, including bad weather, low light levels, and locations without an internet connection.
It is possible to integrate a tyre serial number reader to your preferred tyre management systems or inspection system, so there is no need to change your processes and to train employees on new tools and software.
Companies that need to monitor their truck tyres can implement Anyline’s tyre serial number scanning SDK into their existing processes, so anyone can be equipped with a powerful identification solution. A single mobile device could greatly help you prevent tyre theft, and it case theft happens, help you recover more efficiently.
