PitPro's Tire-Changing Robot Starts Work at a Calgary Kal Tire

PitPro Automation's robotic wheel changer went live in September at a Kal Tire location in Calgary, Alberta, the San Francisco startup's first production deployment outside a lab. Kal Tire operates more than 280 stores across Canada, and the timing, just before snow tire season, matters: 78 percent of Canadian drivers switch to winter tires each year, Fleet Maintenance reported.

Founder and CEO Jeremy Conrad described the deployment to TechCrunch, which first reported the installation on Sept. 23.

How two gantry robots swap a wheel

The system fits inside a single service bay: an alignment lift flanked by two gantry robots, sized roughly like ovens, that use sensors to locate each wheel position, loosen and store the lug nuts, remove the wheel, and install the replacement. It handles vehicles in Classes 1 through 3 and torques fasteners to within 1 percent of OEM specification with digital logging, according to Fleet Maintenance's account of the Calgary unit. A Ford F-150's wheel and tire assembly weighs about 70 pounds, the outlet said, giving a sense of the load each robot repeats four times per vehicle.

PitPro says the full four-wheel swap takes under 15 minutes, a figure Fleet Maintenance calculates is roughly 90 percent faster than a manual change. That number is company-reported and has not been independently timed by either outlet, and it does not include check-in, wheel balancing, torque verification or payment, all of which still add to a customer's total time in the bay.

"All the core metrics are meeting our expectations"

Kal Tire's senior vice president of strategy and innovation, Kenneth Chaun, framed the deployment as additive rather than a replacement for staff: "Automation as a force multiplier for our team members, not a replacement for them," he told Fleet Maintenance. Conrad, in the same report, said of the early results, "All the core metrics are meeting our expectations."

Conrad's account to TechCrunch of the labor problem PitPro is selling into was more specific than the usual shortage talking point: "One shop manager was telling me they had to get special permission to pay more because a Panda Express opened across the street and it took about half their employees."

What a demo doesn't show: dandelion seeds

The gap between a controlled demo and an open Calgary bay showed up during installation, when Conrad posted a photo of the robots almost completely covered in dandelion seeds. "We looked into it, and it's not going to be a problem for us," he told TechCrunch. "But it's just like… I had never thought about that we might need to deal with a dust cloud of dandelions." Neither outlet reported PitPro's total funding raised, and PitPro has not said how many additional Kal Tire locations, beyond the one Conrad says is already scheduled for later in 2026, are under discussion.

The deployment sits in the same labor-arbitrage territory as Universal Robots' pricing-shy Gen 7 cobot launch, and the sensing problem PitPro solved for lug nuts and tread depth is a narrower version of the one five research groups are still racing to solve for general-purpose robot touch. PitPro's bet is that a single, repeatable task beats a general one to a working product first.

Metric	Figure
Time for a four-wheel swap	Under 15 minutes
Torque accuracy	Within 1% of OEM spec
Vehicle classes supported	1 through 3
Kal Tire locations in Canada	280+