Eureka! Intelligent tyre sensors measures vehicle weight

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Continental Auto Design Engineers are working to develop a tyre pressure monitoring system that can accurately calculate the weight of a vehicle.

In the past, it was more or less up to drivers to guesstimate to the best of their abilities whether or not the maximum permitted payload of a car had already been reached, says Andreas Wolf, who heads up the company's body and security group. 

Future vehicles will be able to tell the driver whether the payload has already exceeded the maximum permitted limit, or whether the tyre pressure would simply need to be adjusted accordingly. In this way, our tyre pressure sensors will not only help to save fuel, but also offer active assistance in terms of vehicle safety.

The ContiPressureCheck system will rely on sensors that can accurately detect the size of the contact patch where the tyre meets the road. 

By registering the rolling characteristics of the tyre with every revolution, and taking into account the existing tyre pressure and data about how the tyres are fitted, Wolf says the system will be able to ascertain the vehicles weight after just a few hundred meters of driving. 

This data would then be relayed wirelessly to the driver, informing them whether they have exceeded the recommended payload for the vehicle, or whether the tyre pressure should be adjusted.