“Michelin, I have questions”
On 31 January 2026, Motor1 wrote up a TikTok video. Jay Pichardo, a car salesman at Mercedes-Benz of Manchester, New Hampshire, who posts as @jay_sellsbenz, had filmed the sidewall of a Michelin Pilot Sport 4S and circled the RFID marking in red. “Michelin, I have questions,” he said. “Why is there an RFID tag on a tire? Explain that to me.” The clip had passed 17,600 views when JT Wilson covered it, and Carscoops, SlashGear and BGR followed.
Nothing new had happened. Michelin, the French tyre maker, had been building that tag into production tyres for about a decade. What was new was that a non-specialist audience noticed, and that many of them assumed it was there to watch them. The comments read as free market research: guesses at pressure monitoring, logistics, recall tracking and litigation records, and one landing on counterfeit verification with “So u know it’s real”.
Ten years of tagging, almost entirely unnoticed
The technique predates Michelin’s programme. Tire Review reported on 30 July 2014 that Goodyear brought RFID to NASCAR in 2000, and that the Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship pioneered pit-lane tyre scanning to police spec-tyre allocation. Most of those tags came from Hana Technologies, a maker of embeddable tyre tags with roots in microelectronics and watch production; chief executive John Erdmann told RFID Journal on 13 March 2025 that Hana tags have run in NASCAR since 2006 and MotoGP since 2016. The ambition is old: Michelin hired Hana RFID in 2012 for bus tyres at the London Olympics, and Kumho Tire, the South Korean maker, said in 2013 it planned to tag all 35 million tyres it built annually.
Volume came with trucks. Ralph Dimenna, then chief operating officer of Michelin Americas Truck Tires, told the American Trucking Associations Technology and Maintenance Council meeting in Nashville in February 2017: “Michelin is the first manufacturer to integrate RFID into its full commercial truck tire portfolio.” Heavy Duty Trucking reported on 28 February 2017 that installation began in July 2016, and that around 98% of Michelin’s global commercial truck output was already built with an embedded chip.
Why it took a decade: heat, flex and steel
A tyre is close to the worst home you can give a passive UHF RFID tag. These are battery-free tags read in the 860 to 960 MHz band, branded RAIN RFID by the alliance that promotes them, and the tyre brief is brutal: survive vulcanisation, a million kilometres of flexing and retreading, transmit through rubber loaded with steel, and last the tyre’s life, because the tag can never be swapped out. Our RFID glossary covers the terminology and the UHF hub the wider context.
Michelin’s answer is its fourth-generation tag, described by Claire Swedberg for RFID Journal on 1 August 2024. A 37 millimetre coiled antenna sits horizontally across the sidewall, embedded in the rubber layers where mechanical constraint reaches the chip least, twisting and bending to absorb thermal and mechanical stress. Earlier generations needed a Chemloc adhesive coating to bond the tag to the rubber; Gen 4 drops it, and its tyre-compatible material survives recycling. “The integration inside the tire is much easier,” said Laurent Couturier, Michelin’s RFID system designer.
The less-told story is that the universal tag keeps losing to the bespoke one. Hana builds the Direct Attach tag, a small PCB wired to an antenna, and the Linkless Tag, developed at Michelin’s request from 2017, in which a spring is the antenna and the chip floats at its centre. Linkless is the better idea on paper, but RFID Journal reported in March 2025 that “long-term industry experience finds that customized implementations often provided better performance, leading tire manufacturers to continue to use the Direct Attached tag”.
Who actually makes the tags
To be precise about supply: in May 2024 Murata, the Japanese components maker, licensed the Gen 4 design from Michelin for mass production from January 2025. RFID Journal reported that Michelin “is also working with Beontag and Hana RFID to produce more tire-specified RFID tags to support the demand that is coming”, and Beontag announced its own Michelin partnership on 12 June 2024. Hana has supplied over 250 million tyre tags, and its branding and business strategist Val Peters offers a line any RF engineer will respect: “we never heard about an electronic failure due to breakage of the tag. It’s just never happened.” Michelin’s own volume, per Couturier in August 2024, was around 50 million tyres, with passenger cars worldwide the next target at roughly 100 million. Consumer outlets reporting that 100 million as a fitted total have read a target as an achievement.
2026 is the year the rest of the industry caught up
One manufacturer tagging tyres is a logistics project; an industry agreeing how to read each other’s tags is a platform. ISO 20910 gave the sector a common numbering scheme for tyre tags in 2019, and Michelin cites it alongside ISO 20909; see our standards coverage. Above it sits the Global Data Service Organization for Tires and Automotive Components, or GDSO, a Belgian non-profit founded in early 2022 by Michelin, Bridgestone, Continental, Goodyear and Pirelli to standardise tyre data and resolve each tyre’s SGTIN-96 identifier.
Its timeline is the strongest evidence that something changed. GDSO registered as a liaison organisation with CEN-CENELEC Joint Technical Committee 24 on Digital Product Passports on 1 October 2025, and Toyo Tires joined as a full member in September 2025, its traceability programme covered here on 18 December 2025. On 12 February 2026 GDSO signed a memorandum of understanding with the RAIN Alliance, whose Tyres Masterclass of 23 April 2026 handles education, and on 8 April 2026 it launched a North American lifecycle services ecosystem for services, governance and pilots. Then on 12 August 2026 Linglong Tire became the first Chinese manufacturer to take full membership, which is when a European founders’ club starts to look like a world standard.
Continental, the German tyre and automotive supplier, announced the Conti Hybrid HT 5 trailer tyre on 16 February 2026, completing its Conti Hybrid Generation 5 family, and said plainly that “All tires are also equipped with RFID sensors”. That is a commercial trailer line, not a passenger-car rollout, and fellow GDSO founders Bridgestone and Pirelli publish no volumes at all. Accounts of the first carmaker mandate conflict, with RFID Journal putting Volvo’s in the late 2010s and Impinj at 2021. Either way it is vehicle tracking of a quietly consequential kind.
The regulation nobody can date yet
Published timings for the rules conflict wildly. Motor1 said digital product passports would be required for tyres from 2027; Beontag’s June 2024 release said the requirement “will comes into effect for tires from 2028-2030”. As of 20 October 2026, tyres are a priority product group in the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation working plan for 2025 to 2030, but no delegated act for tyres exists or has been proposed, so no date is legally fixed. The years conflict because adoption and application differ: trackers expect adoption around 2027 plus a transition of at least eighteen months, putting real obligations at 2029 at the earliest, and those are estimates, not law. The plumbing runs ahead of the rules, since the EU’s central DPP registry went live on 20 July 2026 and we set out what those rules mean for RFID on 19 August 2026.
Not location tracking, but not nothing either
Back to the salesman with the phone. Michelin’s published position, on its RFID page as fetched on 20 October 2026, is clear and technically accurate. The tag holds “the tyre’s unique identifier” in SGTIN-96 format, compliant with ISO 20909 and ISO 20910. A standard read returns the commercial designation, meaning size, brand and range, while “any other information related to the RFID of the tyre is subject to the prior permission of the tyre user”. The identifier, the company says, “can’t give access to personal data without the consent of the person concerned” and is “comparable to a tyre-specific serial number”. That is true: no GPS, no clock, no record of where the tyre has been.
Now the half the industry says less often. The identifier is unique and permanent, because once embedded, as Michelin states, “the tyre identifier can’t be changed and the tag can’t be deactivated without damaging the tyre”. And the read range is not a few centimetres: RFID Journal put it at “on average, the tags can be read at distances from two or three to five meters”. So anyone standing near a parked car with a handheld can collect four permanent unique serials tied to that vehicle, without touching it and without the owner knowing. That is not location tracking. It is also not nothing, because a persistent unique identifier readable at a distance is the raw material from which location histories get built.
Michelin’s safeguard is real but narrow. Asked who can read the tag, it answers: “Anyone who has a scanner, the associated API and is authorised by the consumer to collect information about them.” The protection sits in the API and in contract, not in the tyre, and the owner cannot verify who has read their serials, switch the tag off, or audit whether those access controls are honoured.
The sector’s failure is not the engineering, which is excellent, nor the privacy design, which is defensible. It is that ten years and tens of millions of tagged tyres went by without anyone explaining this to the people buying the tyres. So when the explanation reached a mass audience in January 2026, it was framed not by Michelin, GDSO or the RAIN Alliance, but by a thirty second video asking why there is a chip in the thing you drive on.
So is this the breakthrough?
On the evidence, yes, with one caveat. The engineering argument is settled: Gen 4 solved embedding, durability through retreading and recyclability, and Hana reports no electronic failures from breakage across more than 250 million tags. The shared data layer, which turns tagged tyres into an industry capability rather than one maker’s private asset, visibly accelerated across 2025 and 2026, and European regulation will eventually make tyre identification compulsory, even if nobody can yet date it.
The caveat is the one Pichardo stumbled into. Fleets need no persuading, but passenger cars are the 100 million unit prize, and those tyres are bought by people who have just learned from TikTok, rather than from the companies responsible, that there is an unremovable, remotely readable serial number in something they own. Peters told RFID Journal in March 2025: “We’ve come such a long way as an industry in making [tire tracking] possible, but at the end of the day we’re still at the beginning.” That looks right. What slows this down now is not tag physics, steel interference or read range. It is consumer trust, and the sector has ten years of silence to make up for.
