While driving, the only point of contact you have with the road are your tyres. One of the most important pieces of equipment of your vehicle that sadly is also one of the most overlooked of them all. When it comes to safety on the road, Tyres in Southampton always have your back, but what makes them capable enough? The answer to this is tyre treads.
As you must be aware, your overall safety while driving can be greatly improved through good tyre maintenance. When it comes to good tyre care, having an ideal tyre tread depth is always crucial to remember.
Tyre Treads:
The rubber patterns of grooves and sipes that outline a tyre and establish a point of contact with the road are referred to as tyre treads. Tread lugs, grooves, ribs, sipes, and blocks are all components of a tyre tread pattern.
Importance of good Tyre Tread Depth
You may not know it, but tyre treads play an important role when driving your automobile, making it even more important to maintain them. Here are a few important functions of tyre treads:
Tyre Traction
Tyre traction relates to your car’s ability to grip and stability on the road while driving. A good tyre tread depth enables your car to maintain a good level of tyre traction, allowing for a safe and smooth driving experience. Treadless tyres are highly sought after as racing tyres but are a very poor choice in terms of everyday driving. Worn out tyres can easily slide and slip on wet or snowy roads, leading to fatal situations.
Vehicle Handling and Drivability
Tyre treads have a significant impact on your vehicle’s handling and steering ability. Various tread patterns and designs will offer different features and advantages over each other and have different effects on your driving experience.
For instance, symmetrical tread patterns are more suited for daily commuting because they give a smoother driving experience, greater stability, and lower rolling resistance. However, when driving on wet, slippery roads, asymmetric tyre treads give better handling, more curve stability, and a firmer grip.
Improved Fuel Efficiency
Because of the low traction, a more symmetrical tread pattern may improve your vehicle’s fuel economy. As a result, you’ll save money while also helping the environment by lowering your fuel consumption.
Brake Deployment and Acceleration
As tyre treads are responsible for maintaining the grip on the road as well as providing driving stability, they also enable your vehicle to have efficient and safe acceleration. Good tyre tread depth also helps in providing efficient braking distance of the vehicle over the road.
Seasonal Adaptability
Tyre treads can be easily used to drive even during rain and snow. This is an extremely important feature, especially when one is living in a region that experiences such weather daily. Tyre tread designs have been developed in such a way that they prevent water from logging in between the tyre and the road and effectively dispel the water out of the way.
Factors that affect Tyre Tread Depth
Your tyre treads tend to wear down when your car makes greater contact with the road and that’s the one thing you cannot prevent from happening.
Many factors might cause tyre treads to wear out sooner than intended. There are several times these are easily avoidable with a quick visit to the auto repair shop. A few of these factors are-
- The presence of inadequate tyre pressure. Whether it’s over or under-inflation; it causes the tyre treads to wear out unevenly and also causes a direct loss in grip and vehicle handling.
- Poor or rash driving habits such as sudden brake deployments at high speed or high-speed corner-cutting.
- Overloading your vehicle causes the tyres to exceed their load-bearing limit which directly results in them being overheated.
- Misaligned or unbalanced wheels
Tyre Depth Maintenance
The hard truth is that no matter what you do you cannot prevent your tyres’ tread from wearing out but you can certainly do your part in minimising it.
- Make sure your wheels are perfectly aligned and balanced.
- Have your tyres rotated at fixed intervals?
- Make sure your tyres are clean as road dirt and muck can degrade the tyre rubber and also cause cuts and faults on the tyre tread pattern.
- Perform the simple ‘coin test’ on your Goodyear Tyres Southampton treads, if the coin is hardly within the tread, it might be time to replace or get them repaired as soon as possible.
