What benefit does the tyre digital product passport have for me as a fleet manager?

What you must do concretely

What is expected of you

A fleet manager does not buy tyres to resell them, but to have them driven — on delivery vans, lorries or a staff fleet. The tyre passport is then not an obligation that falls on your plate like it does for an importer or manufacturer, but an information source that you can use. Yet there are a few points where your role becomes relevant.

Consulting data via the web portal

Article 14 of the ESPR (Regulation (EU) 2024/1781) regulates a web portal in which the data from the digital product passport can be consulted. For a fleet manager, this means in practice that the technical and sustainability information of a tyre must come not only from the supplier, but can also be requested yourself via the QR code on the tyre. With a fleet of dozens to hundreds of vehicles, that is a different way of working than browsing through supplier documentation: the information is attached to the product itself.

Knowing which passport belongs to which tyre

Article 9 of the ESPR describes what will be included in the digital product passport. For fleet management, the practical translation is that each tyre — or each batch of tyres — has its own passport, linked to the QR data carrier on the product. When purchasing large quantities of tyres for a fleet, it is therefore important to know which passport belongs to which delivery, especially if tyres from different brands or suppliers are in use alongside each other. This is not an obligation that follows from the ESPR itself, but a practical consequence of how the passport works.

Passing on data when selling or scrapping vehicles

When vehicles with tyres are resold — for example during fleet replacement — the question about the tyre data often comes along with the question about the vehicle. A buyer of a used company vehicle can access the tyre data just as well as the first user, as long as the passport remains available. For a fleet manager, this is more of an opportunity than a burden: it is information that already exists and does not need to be built up separately.

Where things go wrong in practice

A number of situations occur regularly in fleet management practice.

Tyres are purchased centrally, but not registered centrally. In companies with multiple locations, each branch sometimes purchases tyres itself, without there being an overview of which tyres — and which passports — belong to which vehicle. This becomes difficult as soon as a question arises about a specific batch, for example in case of damage or wear complaints.

The QR code is not checked upon receipt. Tyres are delivered, mounted and the code on the tyre is never scanned. Only when something goes wrong — a complaint, an inspection, a recall — does it become clear that nobody knows whether the code works or which passport it refers to.

Maintenance contractors work with their own administration. In outsourced tyre maintenance, the garage or tyre service often keeps its own system, separate from the passport. That works in itself, but leads to duplicate or conflicting information if the passport and the own administration do not align.

Vehicles are sold without anyone thinking about the tyre data. When disposing of vehicles, attention is often on the vehicle itself — mileage, maintenance booklet, inspection certificate — and not on the tyres on it. The passport is there, but nobody points it out to the new owner.

Different suppliers, different platforms. A fleet with tyres from multiple brands and suppliers may encounter passports hosted via different systems. This is not a problem in itself — the QR code works the same everywhere — but it does require that someone in the organisation keeps an overview.

What you can record

For fleet management, it is above all useful to establish how the tyre information flows within your own organisation, even though the obligation to draw up the passport lies with the manufacturer or importer.

• An overview per vehicle or per fleet of which tyres are fitted and where the associated product passport can be found.
• A fixed procedure for scanning or checking the QR code upon receipt of new tyres, so that it does not have to be determined afterwards whether the code works.
• Agreements with maintenance partners or tyre services about who consults the passport data and whether that aligns with your own maintenance records.
• A protocol for transferring tyre data when selling or disposing of vehicles, so that a new owner does not have to search for the passport themselves.
• With multiple locations: an agreement on who is responsible for maintaining the overview — that aligns with the question can multiple locations of my company manage the same product passport.

For those wondering whether all of this is already relevant as long as the delegated act for tyres has not yet been published: there is already something to be done now without waiting for the final rules, as described at what can I already do while the rules are not yet final. It is also useful to know exactly what your own customers or users can see when they want to view the data, for example at can my customers check the product passport data before they buy — the same question applies to fleet managers who pass on tyres to drivers or subcontractors. And in the event of a recall of a particular tyre batch, it is useful to know in advance how the product passport helps, see does the product passport help with a recall of tyres and how does it work.