RFID in Tires Has Taken 10 Years, but Is Now the Time It Breaks Through?

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”…

Source: RFID News