When do you check yours?

How often do you honestly get down on hands and knees and thoroughly inspect your own tyres? Once a week? Once a month? Never?

The alarming fact is that most motorists never check their tyres - either for wear, damage or pressure - rather leaving it for either the annual service or MOT technician to identify any potential issues. Quite often motorists are contacting us when they have a noticeable problem - either a deflation or severe vibration/noise occurring. Upon inspection we frequently show customers  some pretty terrifying wear states often with large patches of tyre devoid of tread or worse still with the steel carcass hanging out.

So how are these things missed so often?  Well, consider the modern car. Low slung, very little clearance between the arch and the wings and with tuned suspension, ABS, traction control and huge amounts of sound deadening between outside world and cockpit. Basically, the car can be very forgiving on the user when the tyres are in a decidedly poor condition. Unless you park with the wheels fully locked over or indeed get onto bended knees to check the rears from behind the car, you are unlikely to see where most of the wear on the modern car occurs - the inner edge. 

And why so much on the inner edge, you may ask? Again, modern cars have all the benefit of the decades of development and research into handling, braking and safety and therefore cars have wider tyres for more grip and a greater camber angle (the top of the tyre tilts inwards towards the car body to improve handling around corners and for overall stability). A tyre viewed from above with the car parked up may therefore appear to have ample tread on the outer edge but actually already be perilously worn towards the inside.

Take heed of the warning and take a look at yours at your next available opportunity. It takes but a minute or so, even for the absolute untrained eye - but could be the difference between safe driving and some very serious consequences.

And could it all be about to change again??

With the uprise in popularity and abilities of  the electric motor car, tyres look like thy're heading narrow  again for minimum contact and resistance and therefore greater fuel economy.