Learn how Tire Profiles efficiently processes auto service customers

About Tire Profiles

Tire Profiles, LLC, is the automotive industry’s leading tire and alignment laser diagnostic technology company serving auto dealers and tire retailers around the world.

Tire Profiles Products

TreadSpec™ drive-over system is designed for high volume service drive lanes, typically found at new car dealers. TreadSpec is a completely automated, zero-labor system.

GrooveGlove™, a cloud-based, wireless, handheld tool, allows a vehicle scan anywhere in the service facility

Vehicle Identification and Information

Tire Profiles customers rely on the correct identification of each vehicle scanned by TreadSpec™ and GrooveGlove™. Meaning, these products depend on accurate License Plate Recognition (LPR), which is then used for VIN and vehicle data lookup. Without accurate LPR, there is no way to automatically connect Tire Profiles data with customer data. This loss of connection has a direct negative financial impact on customers.

Tire Profiles Original LPR Vendor

The initial vendor provided a hardware-based solution for the TreadSpec™ drive-over system. Each system required an expensive (one-time) license plus a specific, and very expensive, IP camera. When the GrooveGlove™ handheld scanner was introduced, a cloud-based solution was needed, which the previous vendor developed and released as a commercially available product. However, this new cloud-based LPR product came with a monthly fee for each customer, regardless of volume. Additionally, the accuracy was only about 57% in the US and 51% in Europe.

Search for a New LPR Vendor

With the combination of high price and insufficient accuracy, Tire Profiles started to explore alternative LPR solutions. After reviewing available options, they implemented a parallel test using Rekor CarCheck®. This allowed a direct comparison between Rekor and the previous vendor.

Results

The results were as follows:

US: 162 Plates      

Current Vendor Correct: 92 – 56.8%      

Rekor Correct: 152 – 94.4%

EU: 188 Plates      

Current Vendor Correct: 95 – 50.5%      

Rekor Correct: 166 – 88.3%

Price

One of the other major considerations for evaluating Rekor was price. A fixed monthly price of $2000 (for up to 1 million plates per month) allows continued growth without the burden of linear expense growth.

Decision

Selecting Rekor and CarCheck was easy. Even if pricing could have been restructured with the previous vendor, there was no way they could address the product’s accuracy issues in a reasonable amount of time.

“It has been great working with the team at Rekor. As LPR is a critical component in our line of products, we needed the ability to manage and monitor (LPR) servers in North America, South America, Europe, and the Pacific Rim. To this end, Rekor worked out an arrangement with us where we host our own instances of CarCheck servers.” - Jeff Hislop, CTO

Conclusion

In a direct comparison, using the same set of images, CarCheck was 65% more accurate than the previous vendor. On top of that, the pricing model for CarCheck provided a much lower cost.