Ground Truth vol.2 | ENSO
On how tires are a national security issue, at the heart of scalable robotaxi economics, and the key to AVs fulfilling their sustainability promise
This is the Ride AI newsletter: The most comprehensive digest of news and intelligence at the intersection of technology and transportation.
Welcome back to Ground Truth, a new series from Ride AI that focuses on the entrepreneurs and executives building the infrastructure layer for scaling autonomous vehicles.
This week we’re talking to Gunnlaugur Erlendsson, the Icelandic founder and CEO known simply as G, who started ENSO in London in 2016 with a thesis the old school tire industry didn't want to hear: the tires designed for combustion engines were quietly undermining both the performance and sustainability promise of electric vehicles.
The word "enso" means "circle" in Japanese, a fitting name for a company that has spent nearly a decade trying to close the loop on one of the most overlooked problems in clean transportation and now autonomous vehicles.
To suggest candidates for us to feature or to get in touch about partnership opportunities, please drop me a note at mike@rideai.org.
A chat with Gunnlaugur Erlendsson, ENSO
G, thanks for jamming with Ride AI. Let’s get right to it.
You’ve described the AV ecosystem as the proverbial Yukon gold rush. What do you mean by that, and where does ENSO fit in the analogy in this moment in the cycle?
In every gold rush, the prospectors get the headlines but the people who built lasting wealth were the ones selling picks, shovels, and Levi’s jeans. The AV ecosystem is in exactly that moment. Every major investor and operator now believes that autonomy and AI are real and the timeline is years, not decades. Enormous capital is chasing the prize of who owns the first profitable autonomous fleet at scale. Waymo, Zoox, Tesla, Uber, and dozens of others are the prospectors. ENSO is in the picks-and-shovels business: the unglamorous, mission-critical infrastructure every single AV depends on, regardless of which platform wins. Every robotaxi needs four tires. Most of them need new ones every few months. Autonomy and AI can’t change those physics.
When we first met, you said that for AV operators, tires are almost always an afterthought… right until the moment they aren’t. What does that moment of reckoning actually look like?
It usually arrives when an operator scales. Launching 10 EVs is a press release, operating 100 EVs is a charging problem, and only when you hit 1,000 EVs do you realize you have a tire problem.
The average American car spends about an hour a day on the road; a robotaxi is in service 16 to 20 hours a day. That’s not a marginal increase in tire usage. It’s an entirely different category of vehicle. And about half of those miles are empty (repositioning between rides, returning to charge), which means that half the time you’re burning through tires on trips that generate no revenue. Multiplied across a large AV fleet, you’re pulling vehicles off the road for tire swaps and repairs every month. Your safety team is constantly flagging tire problems.
Tire procurement, logistics, and fitting quietly become your second-biggest operating expense behind energy. That’s the reckoning. You think you’re running an AV hub, you’ve really opened a tire garage.
Right, even before autonomy started to scale, most electric vehicle manufacturers experienced a similar tire reckoning after launch. What does that pattern look like and what can today’s AV companies learn from past deployments?
The historical pattern between new EVs and their tires is remarkably consistent. Manufacturer traditionally launched a new EV using a tire template borrowed from the combustion world, with minor tweaks. Early adopters love the car, and that is part of the problem.
EVs are genuinely fun to drive, the instant torque is intoxicating, and drivers push them harder than they would a combustion equivalent. EVs are also disproportionately concentrated in cities, where stop-start traffic and sharp cornering compound the wear.
Then the wear complaints start: Tesla owners reporting tire life well below what they expected, Rivian R1T drivers reporting rears chewed up far faster than expected, Lucid Air owners facing $2,000 tire bills, GMC Hummer EV running through tires at a rate that shocked even seasoned reviewers. Real-world range also tends to fall short of the brochure as soon as the first tires are replaced, because most replacement tires on the market are less energy-efficient than the OE tires the manufacturer specs for launch. The manufacturer may then scramble to commission a new tire, often two to three years post-launch. By then the damage is done.
The same pattern will hit every AV operator that doesn’t plan for it.
What specifically makes a tire engineered for an autonomous or electric vehicle different from what’s on the market today?
EVs are heavier (batteries can add 30–40% mass), produce instant torque, and recover energy through regenerative braking, all of which beat up and wear out tires faster than combustion vehicles. At the same time EVs are about three times more sensitive to tire efficiency, which means that the wrong tire can severely limit range by increasing energy consumption per mile.
AVs layer on top with extreme duty cycles and remarkably consistent but unforgiving computer-driven inputs. And because AV passengers are paying customers, the tire also must deliver a quiet, comfortable ride. There’s no steering wheel to grip, just a back seat and an expectation. A purpose-built AV tire uses specialized rubber compounds, a reinforced structure, and tread patterns optimized for low rolling resistance and even tire wear.
Buying standard passenger tires off the shelf and bolting them onto a robotaxi is a false economy. You may save on the unit cost upfront, but you spend it back many times over in early replacement, higher energy costs, lost range, and increased downtime.
The goal isn’t a “better tire” in the abstract; it’s a custom tire that survives 80,000+ miles of robotaxi life without compromising range, safety, or comfort. Independent testing has confirmed that ENSO delivers industry-leading energy efficiency on Teslas, an advantage that compounds across millions of fleet miles into measurable range and cost-per-mile gains. The same engineering carries into our dedicated AV tire range, built for the high duty cycle, passenger expectations, and operating economics these AV fleets actually face.
Let’s chat sustainability for a minute. Is it possible that autonomous vehicles, despite eliminating tailpipe emissions, actually make urban air quality worse when you consider their current tires and the fact that they are logging 20X the miles of most passenger cars?
It’s not just possible. It’s already happening. In the UK, government research has concluded that PM2.5 and PM10 air pollution exposure from tires now exceeds the exposure from exhausts. This means that tire wear is already the dominant source of vehicle particulate pollution in most modern cities. The OECD estimates that tires shed roughly 6 million tonnes globally each year, and EVs, being heavier, shed measurably more per mile.
A robotaxi may log 100,000 miles a year, about eight times the mileage of the average American driver, and unlike a private car, it produces that pollution even when no one is driving in it. This means that about 50,000 miles a year are empty repositioning that still wears the tires and generates air pollution.
More AVs on the road means more total miles, which means more invisible tire pollution in the breathing zones of cyclists, pedestrians, and kids in strollers. We’ll have traded tailpipe smog for airborne microplastic pollution. That trade isn’t inevitable. The engineering exists today to do materially better: tires that shed less, last longer, and are designed for the real-world duty cycle AVs are actually doing. The AV transition is the natural moment to deploy these technologies.
You’ve made the case that tire supply is at its core a national security issue. Mind walking us through that?
Look at the actual numbers. In 2025 the U.S. imported 235 million tires, roughly two out of every three tires consumed in the country, and about two-thirds of those came from Asia. The import share has grown every year since 2020. Now apply that to autonomous fleets. The average American drives roughly 13,500 miles a year; a robotaxi logs up to 100,000, eight times the mileage. At minimum that’s the same 8x multiple of tire consumption, and in practice more, because EVs and AVs wear tires faster than equivalent combustion vehicles due to increased weight and torque.
That puts AV operators at the head of the queue on one of the most concentrated supply chains in the vehicle industry. We’ve already seen the preview: during COVID, shipping rates from Asia jumped four to five times and tire delivery lead times stretched to several months; the 2024 Red Sea disruptions did it again. Every AV operator needs to be able to answer one question: when, not if, the next disruption hits, how do I guarantee I always get the tires I need to keep my AV fleet running?
The tire industry has been dominated by the same handful of players for decades. Why hasn’t someone already solved purpose-building for electric and AVs?
Classic innovator’s dilemma, which is not unique to the tire industry.
The big five (Michelin, Bridgestone, Goodyear, Continental, Pirelli) control more than half of the global tire market and have hundreds of factories optimized for legacy products. Re-engineering compounds, tread designs, and manufacturing lines for an EV market that is still under 10% of current vehicle sales, and a much smaller percentage of the 1.5 billion vehicles driving, is a massive capital risk, and their distribution channels (dealers, retailers) make pricing and new product experiments painful. Their R&D is genuinely good, but historically pointed at incremental improvements for combustion vehicles and only slowly adjusted for EVs.
A new entrant like ENSO can start with a blank sheet, optimize for real-world EV and AV physics, skip 80 years of accumulated assumptions about what a tire “should” be, and instead simply deliver a better product, at an affordable price, while capturing the real-world data to continuously improve.
ENSO prices 10–20% below Michelin and Goodyear. How is that possible, and what does it mean for the economics of running a fleet?
We sell direct to fleets and drivers, which cuts out the dealer margin (typically 30–40% of the retail price of a major brand tire). We also run a deliberately narrow high-performance product line, which lets us scale specific compounds without the inventory drag of supporting over 2,000 tire sizes, most sold in limited volumes.
The economics work hardest in high-utilization applications: rideshare, last-mile delivery, light-duty commercial vehicles, and autonomous fleets. At that scale, ENSO can save large operators in excess of seven figures per fleet per year through a combination of lower unit cost, longer life, and better range that reduces energy costs per mile. That’s the number AV operators ultimately live or die by, and tires are one of the largest controllable inputs in the whole P&L.
You’ve talked about treating tire development more like software, with continuous iteration based on real-world fleet data. What does that actually look like in practice?
Traditional tire development is a five-year waterfall: design, make, test, certify, sell. And sell again. And again, the same product. We treat it more like a software release cycle, except our product is the hardware that touches the road.
Fleet partners run our tires in real-world conditions and feed us telemetry: wear patterns, tire pressures, energy consumption, across millions of miles. That data flows back into the next tire revision: a tweaked compound, a redesigned tread design, a reinforced structure. The new spec ships, gets deployed across the fleet, and the loop repeats. A robotaxi running for months in the Texas heat tells us things that no test track can. The cycle compresses from years to months, and every iteration is anchored to real-world data from vehicles actually in service.
Last we chatted, you were close to launching a direct-to-driver advertising program in the U.S. this summer. What’s the thinking behind going to market that way?
The tire industry has trained consumers to buy tires the way they always have: reluctantly, at the recommendation of whoever happens to stand behind the counter that day. That model worked for a century because nobody had a reason to seek out a specific tire brand that delivered anything different.
EV and AV drivers do. They care about range, durability, and environmental footprint, and they can feel the difference within a charge of driving. They are also frustrated by how often they need to change tires. We’ve already proven that our model works.
In 2025 we launched a partnership with Uber, the only one of its kind in the tire industry and Uber’s first collaboration with a Finalist in Prince William’s Earthshot Prize. Through the Uber Marketplace app, Uber drivers in London now get 50% off ENSO EV tyres. London is Uber’s global capital of electrification, with over 40% of all Uber miles in the city now fully electric. ENSO’s U.S. launch later this summer extends the same direct-to-driver model into the largest EV market in the world. In parallel, our dedicated AV tire range has been developed and is ready to deploy with autonomous fleet operators. It’s the Tesla playbook applied to an industry that has never been disrupted from the consumer end.
Take the last word. What’s the one thing you’d want every AV operator reading this to take away?
Tires are the part of your fleet that touches the road, kills your range, sheds microplastics into the air of the cities you operate in, and decides whether or not your vehicle stops in time. They’re also your most concentrated supply-chain exposure.
Your AV fleet may cover up to eight times the mileage of the average American driver, so the cost, performance, and availability of tires will move the economics of your business more than almost anything else in your control. Treat them like the safety-critical, mission-critical, brand-critical infrastructure they are. The operators who do that early will build a structural advantage.
Pick your tire partner the way you pick your battery supplier or your sensor stack. Tires are exactly that critical to autonomous mobility. Without them, you’re not going anywhere
Who else should I talk to for this series?
The most fascinating and under-covered angle in this whole AV space is the financing. How are people funding the AV fleets of the future? Dan Saunders at ZETI is the right starting point, as their software has enabled financing per mile for ride-hailing fleets. Broader infrastructure investors like Macquarie and Brookfield are active in fleet finance. On the operating side, talk to companies like Moove, Avomo, and OttoCar, who run fleets of vehicles in commercial service every day and see all the real-world wear, downtime, and underlying economics that the headlines miss. A fleet insurance underwriter is also worth your time, because they probably see the real-world failure data that nobody else has access to.