The Tyres website is another example of a ‘what might have been‘ concept.
The intention, never fully developed in 2008, was to build a B2C website selling car tyres. Behind the scenes, after inputting a tyre size (e.g., 1955517V) the site found prices from a number of suppliers and selected the best value products.
The website was left unfinished but illustrates the power of the web to ‘disintermediate’ certain transactions. Theoretically, many consumers could have searched for tyres on a website back-ended to a handful of major tyre manufacturers and distributors.
If that sounds a lot like BlackCircles, founded earlier in 2001, it was.
And Blackcircles.com was acquired by Michelin for £50 million in 2015!
C’est la vie!
