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Comment by gosub100 | Hacker News Reader

I would like to see a rule added that requires embedding a uuid for each tire so if you litter it, or your trucking company loses a re-tread, the state can chase you down and bill you, even years later. Upon selling a vehicle or replacing tires, your name is taken off the liability list and transferred to the new owner or shop. The retreads alone cost the state quite a bit and are dangerous to remove from the traffic lanes.

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Fine, but in that case the trucking companies should also be able to bill the state for all damage caused to their vehicles by badly maintained roads. Maybe every pothole should have an ID so that damage caused by it can be traced back and billed to the state responsible for managing that part of the road?

Better still, have rules about maintenance for both roads as well as vehicles, use regular (yearly, past-the-winter-season for roads) inspections and deal with those who do not abide by the rules by (for vehicles) denying road access until problems have been mitigated or (for roads) deductions in road taxes or something similar, something to make it costly for the state to evade their responsibility. Fines don't work here since they'll just increase taxes to pay them, they need to lose funds to at least the amount of what it would have cost to fix the problems.

If the retread comes off from hitting a pothole, that's an issue with the re-manufacturer.

I didn't use the word "fine" - as in "$500 fine for littering". I said "bill you". If a DoT has to stop and collect a strip of retread then he should bill a proper rate for his time and resources. If a stack of tires is abandoned in the desert, they should be collected, disposed of properly, and send the bill to the owner. A uuid embedded in the tread would facilitate that.

That's backwards, trucks are the cause of most road damage in the first place. Trucking companies should pay enormous fees to use the roads given the disproportionate amount of damage they do to them[1].

It should be cost prohibitive to use trucks for anything but local deliveries. Before you say "this will increase costs for consumers," recognize consumers are already paying for these roads.

1. https://roadtax.carlitelb.org/

Truckers pay for hundreds of thousands of dollars in fuel every year. They pay way more gas tax than you do.

Yes they do, but is it enough?

Given a fixed per-gallon gas tax, if you assume a 3000lb, 2 axle vehicle that gets 30mpg is paying enough road tax to cover its usage, then an 80,000lb, 5 axle vehicle would need to consume 320 gallons per mile to be paying gas tax proportionate to its road usage.

They don't (thankfully), so it's not. Trucks are massively subsidized by everyone else.

Which will just mean that people stop tossing them places they're easy to see and instead throw them into bodies of water or holes in the ground.

You wanna stop people littering tires, make it easy/cheap to get rid of them the right way. Pretty much all the problems in the municipal solid waste industry trace back to some shortsighted "environmentalists" trying to financially punish people for not behaving how they prefer, distorting the market and thereby keeping various types of waste from getting into the hands of the relevant disposal industries.

Do TPMSs have uuids? Although I suppose it would just be a matter of time until Flock tracks those too, if they don't already

Yep! That's how your car picks it's own four tires out of a parking lot full of tires yelling their pressure.

That would be too easy to remove. I'm thinking something like a tiny ribbon with a barcode embedded in the tread. Otherwise it would be trivial to cut the spigot (assuming that's where the sensor is located)

The sensor is stuck to the inside of the wheel and can't be removed without unmounting all 4 tires.

They have a 32 bit ID, assigned sequentially during manufacture, with no coordination among manufacturers to avoid overlap. There will certainly be collisions. Those can often be disambiguated though because there is almost no standardization of anything else about the transmission.

The closest thing to a standard is that most either operate in the 315 MHz band (which is mostly older ones in North America and Asia) or the 433 MHz band (there are restriction in Europe with the 315 MHz band). Most worldwide are now in the 433 MHz band. Tesla switched to using BLE, and others are starting to support that.

For the 433 MHz (and I'd guess 315 MHz) there is pretty much no standard beyond that. It is a lot like the situation in wireless weather sensors and other non-WiFi/non-Bluetooth IoT devices.

Different manufacturers use different modulation (AM or FM), different ways to encode bits, and different packet structures.

These can definitely be tracked. I have an RPi with an RTL-SDR dongle that runs rtl_433 and logs the output. I pick up TPMS sensors from cars other than my own that are at least 18 meters away. This was using the small antenna that comes with many RTL-SDRs. I've now got a much better antenna that is picking up many more things on 433 MHz so probably am getting cars farther away now.

There was a study that explored this [1]. They put a network of 433 MHz sensors along roads and in parking lots. They captured 6 million packets from 20k cars. They found groups of IDs that came and went at the same time to fingerprint individual cars and were able to map out driver's daily routines and commute schedules.

Note that unlike cameras and automatic license plate readers this requires no line of sight, so is much less bothered by heavy rain or fog or dirty plates.

Use a good antenna and you should be able to make this work at up to maybe 100 meters or if the cars are in concrete parking structure.

[1] https://networks.imdea.org/your-cars-tire-sensors-could-be-u...

Aren’t they also removed when you get new tires, so you don’t have to replace them?

They are usually attached to the base of the valve stem, so if you are just putting on new tires they don't even need to be touched.

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