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[narrator] On Tomorrow's World Today, we explore the cutting-edge

advances that are shaping four different worlds.

The world of inspiration, where the wonders of

the natural world amaze and inspire us.

The world of creation, where ideas come to life from

traditional arts.

The world of innovation, where ideas and inventions move

us all forward.

The world of production, where innovations are

mass-produced to improve our lives.

From Inventionland World Headquarters,

here's your host, George Davison.

Hi everybody, I'm George Davison.

In the United States, the history of tire shopping,

it's basically intertwined with the evolution

of transportation.

You see, from the humble beginnings of the automobile

industry in the late 19th century, to the mass production

of vehicles in the early 20th century, tire shopping was...

it was pretty straightforward.

However, as consumers had more car choices,

they also had more tire choices.

And now the drivers had more vehicle types to choose from,

different driving conditions to navigate,

and different performance demands,

it basically left consumers feeling overwhelmed

and uncertain about whether they were buying the perfect

tire for their specific vehicle.

Today, the tire shopping sector is inventing game-changing

technology that creates a better consumer experience.

And it's providing tires that are safer

for your specific conditions.

So I'm sending our field reporter, Greg,

to the world of innovation.

It's down in San Antonio, Texas, to explore

this phenomenon.

There are almost 300 million registered vehicles on

the roads in the United States right now.

From hundreds of manufacturers, there are thousands of models,

but they all have one thing in common.

They all need tires.

Now, as you can imagine, with that many vehicles

and that many options, choosing tires can be,

well, tiresome.

And that's why we're here, to learn from the experts at

Discount Tire the innovative way that they're taking

the guesswork out of choosing the right tire for you.

Let's meet now with David Ginsberg.

He is the Chief Corporate and Strategy Officer

for Discount Tire.

-Hey, David. -Great to meet you, Greg.

Great to meet you, too.

So, here to learn all about Treadwell.

Now, this is really innovative, and it's actually pretty

important, because the number of options as far as tires go for

consumers has really exploded.

You're absolutely right, Greg, and there's a few reasons

why that's happened.

Number 1 is you've got the tire manufacturers looking for every

edge, making the tire a big part of their design.

Secondly, the electric vehicles.

Lots of torque, lots of extra weight, tires need to

accommodate that weight and that torque.

And then finally, specialized categories.

You have all-terrain drivers, mud-terrain drivers,

high-performance drivers, and then, of course, weather

conditions, summer, winter, all season.

The upshot of that is that in 2010, Discount Tire had about

5,000 options for our customers.

In 2024, over 20,000 options for our customers.

[Greg] Wow, so Treadwell's job is basically to take

those 20,000 options

and boil them down to the one recommendation that's

right for me. -That's absolutely right.

But think about those 20,000 tires, and then you overlay

your personal preferences.

The combinations and permutations can be

absolutely overwhelming.

They get into the millions of options.

Treadwell, in a nutshell, looks at who you are,

how you like to drive, what you drive,

and where you drive, and concisely pulls it all

together into one recommendation that's best

for you, safety always being the most important

aspect for us. -Excellent.

Well, I think this is a good opportunity

for us to head outside and see how

the Treadwell process begins. -Let's do it.

-David. -Hi.

Hi, great to see you.

-You as well. -How are you?

-Yeah, very well. -Meet Greg.

-Nice to meet you. -Nice to meet you, too, David.

So, walk me through this process --

what are you working on?

So, right now, I'm doing a full tire and wheel customer safety

inspection on the vehicle, checking everything from

the center cap, lug nuts, wheels, and tires, and when it

comes to the tires, we got this awesome technology,

there's a laser on the back of here that will scan

the tread depth on the inside, middle, and outside.

Once I do that, I'll scan the DOT, which is basically

a serial code on that tire.

If that serial code or DOT has ever been flagged for a recall,

it'll let me know.

But more importantly, it'll tell me the age of

the tire, which is super important when it comes to

the safety for our customers.

Okay, so all that information then is input to Treadwell,

and that's what helps you to make the recommendation.

That's right.

Millions of inspections, just like what David did,

are done across the country.

And then what we are able to do is work out how long this tire

is going to last in this location.

We combine that with the data that we collect

at our test track, how well the tire stops

in the wet, how well it handles,

and that provides the recommendation to find

the best tire for you.

[Greg] So every single tire that comes in is scanned

and then becomes a part of

the Treadwell database, so it's continually

being updated.

The database keeps on building and expanding,

the algorithms keep on updating and learning, and the beautiful

thing is that not only does it help our customers, which is

our primary concern, but our tire manufacturers also learn how to

build better tires, which ultimately benefits

all of us. -Wow.

Well, how have the customers been reacting to this?

Are they positive about the experience?

Absolutely.

Everything's been great, mainly because it takes away

from just mileage of the tire.

It goes into the ride quality, how smooth and quiet it is,

how well it handles, how well it stops.

So it really dives deeper into what that tire can actually do

for you rather than just get you from A to B.

All right, well, I guess

at this point, I'm gonna head out to the track

and meet up with John Baldwin and see how your test

facility really works. -Let's do it.

[Greg] Well, John, I got to go out to one of the retail stores

and see the Treadwell program in action, see how all that

data is put together to help the consumer make the right

choice about a tire.

But this facility, this testing facility, is actually where that

data is generated.

So tell me a little bit about this location.

[John] Texas is great for test tracks.

There are a lot of them here.

This particular location is 45 minutes south of San Antonio,

right off the freeway, about 900 acres.

The weather's good, we can test more days than we can't.

Generally speaking, hot in the summer, cooler in

the winter, but we can find time to test almost every day.

We don't do winter testing here, obviously that's done in

another part of the country, in Michigan.

Well, how do you test for all the different weather

conditions given the fact that the weather is that consistent?

On the track, we've got a large wet pad where we can actually

wet the surface, so we can do wet even if

it's the middle of summer.

We can also test at night or during the day to vet for

the temperature variations.

We have a water truck that we can go out and water dirt

or make a mud pit, so we can simulate a lot of

the conditions that our customers might see.

You obviously can't bring in every kind of vehicle

that exists, you can't bring in

every kind of tire that's out there.

How do you take that data and extrapolate it to give

the broader look at the information?

Vehicles come in classes, so if we pick out a couple of

representative vehicles for that particular class, like say

a sports car or a pickup truck, and they are actually good for

testing, they're repeatable,

we can get good feedback for the drivers,

that's how we end up picking them,

and we can fit different-size tires on there.

We don't have to stay with just the original equipment size.

-We can vary within that. -Take a typical set of tires.

How many different tests would you put that through in

a typical day?

[John] So, generally, we test about seven sets of tires a day,

maybe on three surfaces, so 20, 30 tests, and then it'll take

us two or three days, so 60 tests in general, and each tire

then we test for various things like wet braking,

wet handling, then dry handling, things like

on-center feel or turn in.

We'll look for noise, we'll look for harshness,

we'll look for just general overall feel.

Some of that is subjective, that the drivers actually

feed back to us.

You're not actually doing the testing, you bring in

the third party testers so that you actually have a real

honest evaluation. -[John] That's correct.

The reason to have a test track and have all of this sort of

objective management of the data is so that we get

the true results.

No one at Discount Tire has anything

to do with what the results are.

We just get the data, and then we report it to either

the manufacturers or the customers

or actually both. -Right, right.

Well, what's a, say a piece of equipment like this, what is

this testing? -So this is a traction rig.

So what we test for, this is an objective way to measure how

tires perform in the wet.

The nice thing about this is that you can compare one tire

to another tire on the rig at the same time, or in this case,

we could actually use our tire buffer that we have purchased

recently, and we can shave the tire down to 4/32nds

tread depth, and then we can compare what does a new tire

perform in the wet versus a worn tire at 4/32nds.

Most people evaluate new tires, they all look pretty good

in the wet.

4/32nds is really where you start thinking about it

when you're gonna replace your tires, what is the difference in

performance between new and worn?

You're not only controlling the weather, you're controlling

the wear of the tires, as well.

That's exactly right. That's exactly right.

All right, well, I guess at this point, the last thing

for us to do is get in a vehicle and see how this all goes.

What are we gonna actually test for today?

So, we're going to take a bit of a sports car out,

and we're gonna go out in the wet handling.

And what we're gonna do is we're gonna test for various

high-speed maneuvers and, you know, try not to lose control,

but you never know. -[laughs]

Excellent. Game on.

-Yes. -Let's go.

So John, when you head out onto the track like this,

you're really evaluating the tire.

You're not evaluating the vehicle or the driver.

Correct. We try to control for that.

If you think about it, we have a controlled tire.

We use a controlled surface.

We have a professional driver in a car

that we know very well.

So we can really isolate for how the tire performs

and compare it against other tires.

So how much water is on this track right now?

So currently about 1 and 1/2 to 2 millimeters.

And that's really enough at the right speed to

start hydroplaning.

[John] Easily, yeah, depending on how fast you're going.

So hydroplaning depends on speed as well.

[Greg] Well, as we go into these turns, so you're not really

evaluating the turning radius or any of those kinds

of measurements.

What you're really looking at is the tire itself.

Is there any other instrumentation on the vehicle

that's giving you numbers?

No, other than lap times, it's really

the driver evaluation, and they're trying to get feel.

They're trying to get a max lap time, go as fast as

possible without losing control.

But then they're also trying to feel for things like

linearity and understeer.

All of the things that matter in the dry matter in the wet,

just at a lower speed.

So this is really an example of when that third-party tester

really shows its importance.

Like, you're getting all of your data from the individual.

Absolutely. It matters a lot.

These people are very professional,

been doing it for decades.

Hundreds, thousands of tires evaluated over time.

[Greg] So give me your spot evaluation of the tires

that we're on right now.

[John] So the tires that we're on right now

are high performance.

They really do shine in the wet, and they are

very grippy.

You should feel very confident on these particular tires.

Excellent. All right, well, I think we've

run the track a few times.

Let's head over to the pit stop.

Will do.

-Well, John, we survived. -Yeah, we sure did.

So, now we've been out on the track.

You've experienced the tires that were on this car.

So when one of your professional drivers is out

there, and they're bringing back all that information to you,

how is that then input to Treadwell?

Well, we were out there, we talked about a couple

different aspects of tires.

They probably are looking at 15 to 20 plus their lap time.

So they take all of that, they add it together,

and they come up with a five-point rating system,

say like a three and a half out of five.

That number is then put into the Treadwell algorithm.

And that algorithm then uses a lot of other data that we've

been talking about and then comes up with a recommendation.

All right, well, I'm gonna actually go

get one of those recommendations for myself.

I'm heading back to the store, and I'm gonna

experience the Treadwell program for myself, so what do

you think the chances are I can get behind the wheel this time?

-Not a chance. -Fine, let's get on out of here.

[Greg] While at the store.

I'm going to see how Treadwell works at discounttire.com.

-Hey guys. -Hey Greg.

Well, I survived the track with John, I got to see how

your third-party testers, your drivers, take all of

their experience out there

and then input that data to Treadwell.

But now I think I'm ready to see how this would work for

someone just like me.

Right, so what we're going to do is we're going to say

where you drive.

That's the zip code we've pre-installed.

We've got the vehicle installed, what you drive,

and now we're gonna look at how you like to drive.

So, for example, if we look at the tire attributes, some of

these you might have seen from the track.

For example, stopping and traction would

have been a test you saw, both dry stopping as well as

wet stopping.

Why don't we move steering and precision up in priority

and now hit recommend, and you can see that, in short order,

you get the rank recommendations for you.

Now imagine we decide, well that's not really who I am.

I'm doing a lot of highway driving.

I care for a tire that's going to last a little bit longer,

so I'm going to change my persona to highway.

You'll see that the results change immediately.

Great, and actually, when you do this, the number-one

recommendation might not necessarily be the most

expensive tire -- it's based on me.

That's right.

The recommendations are totally independent of price.

Right, and if we were

to change the zip code and put me in,

say, a different part of the country, those parameters

would all change again. -You're exactly right.

Not only would the wear of the tire change,

but also the weather conditions' impact on what's the right tire

for you would change. -Thank you both very much.

Right now, I'm gonna find out about

the future of Discount Tire.

I'm gonna head out to the bay and meet up with Tom Williams.

-Hey, Tom. -Hey, Greg, how are you?

I'm doing great. Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you.

Well, Tom, I've been learning today about Treadwell.

The real watchword behind this whole system is

the customer experience.

Now, from what I understand, when it comes to

customer experience, you're the guy to talk to.

You've been with this company for 38 years, and you started

out changing tires just like these guys behind us.

So you've seen it all.

Tell me a little bit about that evolution

of the tire industry and your experience with that.

So the big change that's happened all over the years is

the complexity of the vehicle.

With that complexity of the vehicle has changed

the complexity of the tire application.

So we've gone from very few different sizes that

we basically work on across many, many vehicles to where

it's many, many different types of vehicles with many,

many different type tire applications.

So that's been the big transformation that's happened.

What has that done to the customer experience?

I imagine with all of that different information,

all the different options available, the anxiety level

with buying tires has had to go through the roof.

It's overwhelming, right?

So our customers today, when they go to buy tires,

they tell us, they feel outmatched.

They don't know where to start.

They don't know what's the right tire to fit for them.

They don't know what's the right tire to fit

for the vehicle, it's a big investment.

They're doing it once every two, three years.

It's overwhelming for them.

And that's the feedback we get all the time is like,

what do I do here? What's the right thing for me?

And I guess Treadwell is a way to simplify that so that people

don't feel overwhelmed whenever they're trying to make

a tire choice. -Yeah, and that's what's fun.

[Greg] So, you know, coming into a Discount Tire location,

you're gonna be able to talk with an expert about the tire

choices that will work for you, where you live, how you drive,

and what your ultimate goal is with that driving experience.

Yeah, that's what's really cool about it.

Today, we can interact with you and say, "Hey, let me show

you what this tire really does."

Based on our tire testing, based on all real-world results

and tire data, we can take all that information and give

you factual information about a product and what it's gonna

do for you, and that's changed

the game and how we can engage with our consumers.

It's raised the whole level for them.

And it's not just based on what you might have in inventory

or what you need to sell off that day. -That's right.

It's really based around their driving styles,

their driving habits,

and what's gonna suit them in the future.

We don't want to just sit there and just try to sell you

the most expensive tire. That's the wrong thing to do.

And that's what most consumers look at in this industry.

But today, we can take this information and empower

you with data to make an educated decision that's

gonna fit your budget and your needs.

So Tom, as we look ahead, one of the things that

consumers are faced with now is people don't have time often to

come into the showroom, talk with an expert,

and then maybe have to come back the next day

and get their tires.

What is Discount Tire doing to kind of look ahead at that?

Right now, we're working on a new concept, and it's called

Pit Pass -- it's a new store model.

It's a true buy online, drive down to the store and get

the product installed, and that's things that we're

doing to deliver a better, faster experience.

What we're seeing right now is consumers making that

choice online, they raise their hand.

They help make that selection through Treadwell.

That product is then ordered and shipped to the store.

When you arrive, you're out of there roughly about 18 minutes

sometimes, so we're really cutting the time down

end-to-end for the consumers, almost in half sometimes.

[Greg] That's the Pit Pass experience.

[Tom] That is the Pit Pass experience, correct.

Well, Tom, I want to thank you very much.

-Thanks, Greg. -This has been really great.

I know you've got to get back to Pittsburgh.

You're going to be meeting up with George,

and I'm heading that way, too. -All right.

-Why don't you show me out? -Yep, let's go this way.

Hey, Tom, welcome to Inventionland.

Good to see you George, how you doing?

Good to see you too.

Hey, we had this big tire all cleaned up and put up here.

-I heard you were coming -Yep.

with some newfangled device. -Uh-huh.

I'd love to hear more about it.

All right, so this is our mobile device.

All of our associates out there have it.

It allows us to go out and capture the tread depth of

the tire with a laser, so we can actually pull it

across the face of the tire.

That laser is capturing the tread depth of the tire,

which then we can share that with you to tell you

the condition of the tire and how safe that tire

is gonna be able to stop your vehicle in wet tire conditions.

So as tires wear, they start new, they stop

very well in wet conditions.

As they wear down, you can see it takes

longer to stop that car.

So what we want to do is empower you with some

information about the condition of your tire and how safe it is.

Well, you know what, that's what I really care

about, my family's safety on the road, and this tire's

a major part of that.

So this sounds like great technology.

Where's it taking us in the future?

Well, it's helping us be more predictive of when you need to

replace those tires.

So each time you visit us and we capture that tread depth,

and we can see how the tire's wearing based on the miles

you're driving, we can then predict when we think that

tire's gonna need to be replaced to keep you safe

on the road. -That's great technology.

Well, thanks for coming in, Tom.

That's another episode of Tomorrow's World Today.

Tune in for our next episode.

So Tom, I was thinking more about the future

of where we were headed with this.

And remember, tomorrow's world is where inspiration

and creation drive innovation and production.

See you next time.