Pirelli has announced that Aston Martin will use its new Cyber Tyre technology on future models. So here’s Ben Oliver’s explanation of this developing tech from the September 2025 issue of CAR magazine.
Rapidly-reducing contact patch at high speed? You’re most likely about to aquaplane. Reducing contact patch at low speed? You’re probably driving into a soft surface, like snow or mud. Bigger-than-usual contact patches at the rear? There’s a load in the boot, and the relative braking effort needs recalculating.
This potentially life-saving information can be sent to your car’s network of safety systems directly from its tyres. Not, of course, any old tyres, but the Bosch/Pirelli Cyber Tyre, currently under development.
What on earth is a Cyber Tyre?
Depending on your point of view, the tyre is either the dumbest component of your car, or the most evolved. In 130 years of driving on pneumatic tyres we haven’t found a better solution than rubber and air: one that doesn’t puncture, wear out, overheat or need to be topped up. Is that a lack of progress, or should we marvel at how the same idea that John Dunlop had in 1887 to make his child’s tricycle ride better over Belfast’s cobbles now also keeps a modern Formula 1 car stuck to the track?
Either way, we’ll probably now have the tyre for as long as we have the car. While its construction and compounds will continue to improve, the next big leaps in its evolution will come from making this humble hoop of rubber – you guessed it – connected. The Cyber Tyre has the potential to be revolutionary. It made its debut on the Pagani Utopia Roadster but will be rolled out to cars built in greater numbers within three years.
How do Cyber Tyres work?
Key to the system is a tiny sensor able to measure movements of the sidewall under acceleration and deceleration as it rotates downwards into the contact patch, where compression creates a smaller radius. The difference is tiny, but the rotational speed magnifies it to a force measured ‘in the hundreds of g’s’, Pirelli’s chief technical officer Piero Misani tells us.
The micro-electromechanical sensor he and his team have created is tough enough to withstand all of this and communicate with the car via Bluetooth Low Energy. Of course you get pressure and temperature, but the system also provides streams of information your car was previously blind to.
Pirelli fitted an earlier version of the sensor to the McLaren Artura, but the car’s stability systems couldn’t adapt. The project has now cracked that, and it goes much further. By measuring tiny but violent accelerations, it can calculate how big the contact patch is, and thus what’s going on below. It does this earlier and more accurately than ESP can using rotational speed alone.
As cars become increasingly autonomous, data like this will inform not only how the ESP reacts but how the car decides to drive. It’s also an open system, so you won’t be forced to choose Pirelli tyres if other tyre makers adopt the same standard. Rivals like Continental are working on similar ideas.
John Dunlop’s original invention has grown into a $200bn industry, but it’s boringly stable. Can the connected tyre make a difference? To safety, definitely. To its maker? Pirelli hopes so.
Check out the latest preview of CAR’s print magazine.