RoboTire was founded in October 2018 with a simple notion: Make tire rotations faster. Founder and CEO Victor Darolfi got the idea while he was enduring the long wait for maintenance that we are all too familiar with. He thought, if we can use robots to put tires on a car in a factory, why can’t we use them to take off and put on tires during maintenance too?
A little over a year later, San Francisco Bay Area-based RoboTire has a robot that can do just that in only 10 minutes. The robot was designed in partnership with Mitsubishi robotics, and the company is ready to start licensing it out to auto shops and dealerships. At $250,000, the device isn’t cheap, but the company estimates that using it will bring in about $10,000 a month, so it will pay for itself in just two years. The robot is currently scheduled to undergo its first pilot at Toole’s Garage, a repair shop based in San Carlos, Calif.
