NHTSA revealed last week that it would undertake changing tire registration regulations to permit direct registration via the Internet or other electronic means. While not preventing such in recent years, NHTSA had not formally included non-paper registration means.

In a letter to the media, Kruder said, “These proposed changes will give tire dealers the option of providing a paper tire registration form to every customer or completing the tire registration process electronically on behalf of the tire purchaser. By improving tire registration levels everybody wins, especially the tire purchaser because of the safety protection registering tires offers them and their families.

“By NHTSA, tire manufacturers, brand owners and tire dealers all working together to improve tire registration levels and promote this invaluable consumer safety protection, everybody will benefit,” said Kruder. “When tires get registered there is no better method to get potentially unsafe tires off the highway.”

CIMS is the leading producer of tire registrations forms and materials, and has not fully supported non-paper registrations means in the past. “We had some concerns initially when NHTSA first considered changes to the regulation. We will need to study the proposal completely but it looks like NHTSA has addressed these concerns and put procedures in place to protect against them,” Kruder said.

CIMS claims its “initial concerns and questions were often misinterpreted as being against electronic tire registration. Our biggest concerns are to protect tire dealers from additional burden and cost, safeguard the data by ensuring it ends up with the manufacturer, brand owner or designee and insure the cost of registering tires is not passed onto the tire purchaser,” Kruder said. (Tire Review/Akron)