Optimal tyre maintenance for long service life

To ensure that you get everything that you pay for out of your tyres, you will need to take care of them. Tyres will wear over time and will put a lot of distance on them before that. The tyres will experience a wide range of weather and temperatures and often on different surfaces, so you will need to check them on a regular basis. You also need to match the weather to different tyre options so that you use winter tyres during the winter and summer tyres during the warm seasons. You also have the option to use a set of all-season tyres if you have short winters, so it might not make sense to make a tyre change, or there is just very unpredictable weather.

One key thing to check is that the condition of the tyres is good, that there are no cuts, cracks, or other damages to the tyres. Then you will need to check if the wear is even on each tyre. Uneven wear on a tyre can be the cause of a few things. One of them is low tyre pressure, bad shock absorbers, or they are not balanced or aligned properly. You need to take care of this, and you should visit a car service station to find what is causing the uneven wear and correct it.

Uneven wear is not good and the easiest to check if of course the tyre pressure. Low tyre pressure is bad as it will increase the wear and increase fuel consumption. Then to check the shock absorbers, you can look for oil leakage from the tyre area; this is easiest to observe after you have parked and later move the car. If you see oil spill marks on the pavement at the parking spot, it is time to visit the car service station to check the shock absorbers and change the faulty ones. Bad shocks cause the car to sway, and since they also push the tyres towards the road, increasing the grip and reducing the braking distance. Bad shocks can then also cause uneven wear.

When you take the car to a service station for tyre service, either for just checking the tyres or then having the tyres changed, they will check the pressure, make sure that they are balanced, and change the valves. They will also recycle any old tyres and weights, so you don’t have to worry about recycling your old tyres in an environmental way. When you have your tyres balanced, make sure that they use environmentally friendly weights, you want to avoid lead-containing weights. Unbalanced wheels will create side forces, which can be felt in rattling steering wheel and can also cause the wear to be uneven. Another important maintenance step is to rotate the tyres to ensure even wear among the four tyres. This should be done as you change between seasonal tyres and maybe even more frequently if you have an electric or hybrid vehicle.

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