At the start of April 2019, Bridgestone formally completed its billion-dollar acquisition of TomTom Telematics. The goal – as ever – is to capitalise on the benefits of big data, leveraging its usefulness in the cause of better tyres and greater efficiency for all stakeholders. Of course, Bridgestone is not the only tyremaker seeking to make the most of tyre data. Many have invested significantly in developing cyber tyres over the course of the last 10 to 15 years, harnessing the fact that tyres are a vehicles’ only point of contact with the road and therefore the only means of generating real-time road surface:vehicle contact data. This same approach also yields tyre condition and performance data, which can be used for everything from motorsport to commercial fleet applications. But what about in the manufacturing process itself?