Patent ID: 7640216

Claim:
A method for determining tire life cycle cost, comprising: accessing, from a database, a purchase cost of an individual tire for installation on a vehicle; obtaining, from a testing facility, test results that correlate roll resistance with respect to various values of inflation pressure and vehicle imposed load of the tire at a characteristic tread depth of the tire; acquiring, from a customer, a specific inflation pressure of the tire, an installation position of the tire and an average load of the vehicle; establishing, by a computer processor, an operating configuration including (i) an average load of the tire based on the average load of the vehicle, (ii) the specific inflation pressure and (iii) the installation position of the tire; determining, from the test results, by the computer processor, the roll resistance of the tire for the operating configuration at the characteristic tread depth; weighting the roll resistance of the tire based on the installation position of the tire; determining, by the computer processor, fuel consumption required for overcoming the weighted roll resistance of the tire; acquiring a unit cost of the fuel consumption; determining, by the computer processor, operating cost of the tire from the fuel consumption multiplied by the unit cost; combining, by the computer processor, the purchase cost of the tire and the operating cost of the tire to obtain a life cycle cost of the tire; and outputting the life cycle cost from the computer processor to a terminal.