The question, "How long does a tire last?" tends to be followed by several others like, “What causes a tire to wear? When should tires be replaced? What can be done to make tires last longer?” Fortunately, we can help provide clarity around these questions.
There is no exact answer to how long a particular tire will last, but there are things a driver can do to get the most out of their tire investment and avoid driving on unsafe tires. On average, people drive between 12,000 to 15,000 miles a year, which means the average good quality all-season tire will last somewhere between three and five years, depending on maintenance, driving style and conditions, etc.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Association (NHTSA) states a driver is three times more likely to be involved in a crash caused by poor tire condition. Safer is smarter when it comes to the health of tires, so if there is ever a question on tread wear or age, have the tires checked.
Multiple factors play a role in how long a tire may remain in service. Miles driven, road conditions, driving style, maintenance and age all affect how long a tire lasts.
Worn vs. Aged
Tires naturally wear the more they are driven and worn out tires provide reduced traction compared to those with adequate tread, especially in adverse weather conditions. Most drivers understand worn out tires (remaining tread depth at or below 2/32”) should be removed from service.
Many drivers are not aware that minimally used tires, like the ones on recreational vehicles, collectible cars, or even spare tires, tend to experience aging instead of wearing, due to a lack of driving. An aged tire has a substantial amount of tread; however, the structural integrity of the tire is weaker because the tire needs to be driven for the chemicals in the rubber to remain effective.
Curbs, Potholes, and Other Hazards
Hitting curbs or driving on roads in poor condition (potholes, broken pavement, poorly graded railroad crossings, unpaved roads, etc.
) can cause misalignment, and suspension damage that affects tire wear. If your daily drive includes these challenges, be sure to schedule annual suspension, alignment and tire checks.
Weather Conditions
Driving in poor weather conditions like ice, snow, and rain can cause tires to wear quicker because they must work harder to maintain traction. Purchasing tires that are specially engineered to perform in specific weather conditions can provide drivers with an extra measure of traction and control (meaning greater safety) while delivering good treadwear.
Bridgestone offers different types of tires designed to keep you and your car safe during any weather or road condition. For example, Bridgestone's Blizzak tire series is built to perform in harsh winter weather conditions providing durable traction on snowy and icy roads, and the Dueler tire series is one of several that offer a secure grip on wet road conditions for areas that experience heavy rain.
Poor Driving Habits
Poor driving habits like hard cornering, quick acceleration, and sudden braking can increase the stress on tires tremendously, causing them to wear rapidly.
Drivers can extend the life of their tires significantly by avoiding aggressive driving.
Neglected Maintenance
It is important to regularly have tires checked for damage, to maintain air pressure levels, and to keep tires aligned and rotated. Without proper maintenance, tire life can be reduced by as much as half - even more, in some cases.
If the below signs are evident with your tires, it may be time to have them replaced.
Low Tread Depth
Tread loss is a significant sign a tire needs to be replaced. Low tread is a sign driver can physically see happening on their tire. Depending on the part of the tire that is wearing, there may be other problems with the vehicle.
Pronounced inner or outer shoulder wear: tires are misaligned
Edge of the shoulder wear: tires are under-inflated, need to be rotated or both.
Center wear: tires may be overinflated or have been subjected to extremely hard acceleration.
Cupped wear: the vehicle is experiencing suspension problems
All tires have tread wear indicators built-in, but if the tread looks low take time to do the penny test on the tires.
Rough Drive
If you’re experiencing a vibration (particularly if it just started), or high (and increasing) levels of tire noise it may be a sign your tires are out of balance, not wearing properly or have a structural issue. In some cases, this may affect safety, so have your tires checked by a qualified professional asap.
DOT Number
The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) number on the tire’s sidewall is another way to help keep track of when they need to be replaced. It’s easy to identify - look for the letters “DOT” followed by eleven or twelve letters and numbers. On tires made after the year 2000 the final four digits signify the week and year of manufacture. So, a tire with “3618” would have been made in the 36th week or 2018. A tire that has a 3-digit week-and-year code means the tire was made before the year 2000 and should be replaced due to age.
Bridgestone recommends that its Bridgestone or Firestone brand tires be removed from service after ten years regardless of their remaining tread depth. They also recommend periodic inspections by a qualified technician for damage such as punctures, impact damage, signs of improper inflation or overloading, or other conditions resulting from the use or misuse of the tire.
Tires are both one of the largest maintenance expenses a vehicle owner is likely to face, and one of the most critical in terms of driving safety and performance. For both reasons it’s important to care for them properly. Bottom line: good maintenance and driving habits help keep drivers safe, and it saves them money by extending tire life.
Easy Does It
Tire life can be reduced by as much as half when they’re subjected to a lot of hard braking and aggressive acceleration from a standstill. Avoiding tailgating to reduce the need for frequent hard braking will increase tire life.
Easing into the throttle when pulling away from a stop reduces strain on the tires and improves wear. Slowing before sharp corners also reduces stress on tires, as does avoiding potholes and broken pavement when possible. If you’re interested in spending less on tires, following these steps can help.
Regular Maintenance
Another way to extend tire life is to keep up with the proper maintenance of a vehicle and its tires. A couple of things you can do yourself are to check the air pressure and tread depth. You should have a qualified technician periodically check their balance and alignment and be sure to have tires rotated at regular intervals. maintenance is essential for your tires to perform their best and last their longest.
It may be tentative, but tires do have an expiration date. There is a general consensus that most tires should be inspected, if not replaced, at about six years and should be absolutely be swapped out after 10 years, regardless of how much tread they have left.
How do you know how old your tires are? There’s a code on the sidewall that you can read about here. Wear is a far more straightforward consideration: Tiremakers and safety advocates say a tire is worn out when its tread depth reaches 2/32 of an inch. That’s all fine, but what most car owners want to know is how long to expect a set of new tires to last before they need to be replaced.
“I wish it were simple to say how long each tire might last, but tires are different,” said Dan Zielinski, a spokesman for the U.S. Tire Manufacturers Association (USTMA). “Some tire manufacturers offer a warranty as high as 80,000 miles or more, reflecting confidence in that particular product’s longevity based on its engineering, technology, and design. Other tires may be built to provide 30,000 miles of service.” Or less; some high-performance tires on cars driven aggressively will be worn to the 2/32-inch point without ever seeing 15,000 miles, but those are extreme cases.
The average American drives between 14,000 and 15,000 miles a year, according to data from the Federal Highway Administration.
Zielinski said that, if you’re kind to your tires—that is, you aren’t constantly peeling out at stoplights and you properly maintain them—most new tires on the market today will last about 60,000 miles. For what it’s worth, the USTMA did a review of several thousand recently scrapped tires and found that most were three to four years old. There was no way of telling how many miles were on those tires, but it’s easy enough to multiply four years by 15,000 miles annually to confirm the rough approximation of tire durability.
If you want to figure out how soon you’ll wear out the tires on your car, Zielinski said it would be a good idea to start by determining how many miles you drive each year. Divide the number of miles on the odometer by how many years you’ve owned the car (starting, obviously, from when you first got the car and accounting for any mileage it had on it at that time). Then you can compare that with any advertised warranty on the make and model of the tires and figure out how many years of service to expect.
If you live where winter tires are advisable and swap those onto the car for some months of the year, your regular tires will get less use and will endure for a longer period of time, but remember the caveats about tire age.
Zielinski also noted that if you hit the wear bars at 50,000 miles on a set of tires with a 60,000-mile warranty, for example, tiremakers that offer such coverage will typically prorate the price of a new set. In this example, you could expect a discount on the new set equal to one-sixth their price, or about 17 percent. You might not get it, though, if you decide to change brands.
Kypros/Getty Images
In general, the best way to preserve the life of your tires, and keep yourself and your passengers safe, is to maintain them properly. Here are some tire basics and maintenance tips:
Tread
A tire is considered unsafe, and should be changed, once its tread is worn down to 2/32 of an inch, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
Many tires have tread-wear indicators, which are little bars in the tread that show when the tire is worn down to replacement level. These will start making noise to alert the driver that they need attention. You can also use a penny: NHTSA recommends putting the penny in the tread with Abraham Lincoln’s head upside down and facing toward you. If you can see the top of Abe’s head, it’s time for new tires.
Pressure
To ensure even wear, tiremakers and auto companies recommend that vehicle owners check their tire pressures monthly. The pressure should be at the vehicle manufacturer’s recommended level, which is usually found in the car or truck’s doorjamb or in the owner’s manual. One quick and easy way to check tire pressure is with a handheld tire-pressure gauge, which you can find starting around $10 at an auto-parts store. Tire shops will often check the pressure for you. Some gas stations have digital readouts as part of their air pumps; these are not always accurate, though.
It’s best to check the pressures when the tires are cold, meaning that they have not been driven on for several hours. So you’re better off checking them at home after the car has been parked overnight.
Balance and Alignment
Tires need to be round, and the tire/wheel combination needs to be balanced. Tire shops and mechanics will use a balance machine, which spins the wheel to see where high and low spots are and detects any imbalance. The tire shop will then add weights, which are hammered onto the wheel, to balance them. These shops can also make make sure your wheels are aligned to keep the car tracking straight, which also reduces tire wear.
Rotation
Rotating your tires can help prolong their lives.
For front-wheel-drive vehicles, the tires in the front will wear more quickly and can be swapped with the rear ones. The inverse is true for rear-wheel-drive cars and trucks. All-wheel-drive models, too, may need rotation. Most owner’s manuals contain a recommended pattern for rotating tires to spread the wear evenly. The USTMA recommends tires be rotated every 5000 to 8000 miles.
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Many drivers will have their own opinion on this matter. Some will focus on the requirements of the law, namely the minimum tread depth. Others will say that tires should not be used for more than five years, after which the rubber loses its properties and becomes "wooden". Still others will remember that they read about mileage limits ranging from 40 to 60 thousand kilometers.
The fourth will operate only with the amount of money in the wallet.
There is, of course, a very desperate group of motorists. These guys drive to the last and erase the "meaty" tires to the state of a racing slick. Well, individual adepts can be seen rustling spikes on the asphalt in mid-July.
How do you like the rear tires of this Mitsubishi Galant?Whose approach is correct? There is no definite answer, except that the latter pose a serious danger both to themselves and to other road users. Almost all the remaining methods have some logic behind them.
Driving with tires with less than the required tread depth is punishable by a fine. The police rarely pay attention to this, but it is worth keeping in mind the administrative responsibility. So, according to part 5 of article 590 of the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Republic of Kazakhstan, 5 MCI, or 13,890 tenge in 2020, will have to be paid to the treasury. Repeated violation within a year increases the penalty to 20 MCI (55,560 tenge).
The minimum residual tread depth is specified in clauses 5.6.1 and 5.6.2 of Appendix No. 7 TR TS 018/2011 "On the safety of wheeled vehicles". The text says that for passenger cars, the balance must be at least 1.6 mm for summer tires and at least 4 mm for winter and marked with signs: M + S, M & S and M S.
Note that measuring the tread depth with a ruler is an extreme step. Almost all modern tires have special wear indicators. As soon as they appear, the rubber should be replaced.
The average life of almost all tires from major manufacturers is 7-10 years, depending on their seasonality. True, such a duration should be expected if a number of operational requirements are met. These include driving on high-quality roads with optimal tire pressure, correctly set wheel alignment angles and a normally working suspension.
Tire age can be found by a special marker. The four digits enclosed in an oval (more often found on the inner sidewall) are the DOT marking, in a simple way, the production date.
The first two digits indicate the week, and the last two indicate the year of production.
Any of the above parameters can significantly reduce the life of the rubber. For example, with insufficient pressure in the wheel, the side parts of the tread will wear off faster, with high pressure, its middle part. Violations in the geometry lead to uneven tire wear.
The middle part of the tread is worn more. The reason may be an excess of pressure in the wheelHow and where the rubber is stored is also an important factor. Manufacturers recommend a dry, cool and dark room.
In Kazakhstan, you should not count on more than five years of operation. Nevertheless, one set of wheels can really drive for about ten years. Whether it's worth it is a completely different question. From personal (almost) experience: tires manufactured in one of the CIS countries served from mid-2008 to spring 2018. The annual mileage of the car was small, about 10,000 km per year, including sorties on light off-road.
The rest of the tread after all this time would have allowed the same amount of travel, but when one of the tires was removed for repair (the wheel was regularly flattened), the landing board literally crumbled.
Another benchmark for tire replacement is mileage. There are often recommendations on the Web that refer to GOST. Their text says: for passenger cars with a carrying capacity of up to two tons, the service life of tires is 45,000 kilometers.
You can also find references to the operating mileage standards for vehicle tires approved by the Ministry of Transport of the Russian Federation. In them, the average service life varies from 40 thousand kilometers for Russian rubber to 60 thousand for foreign. Note that this document became invalid after the entry of the Technical Regulations of the Customs Union.
You can also determine how much a tire can run by using the Treadwear (TW) parameter, which indicates the tire wear index. He rarely receives attention.
This figure is usually of interest to those who plan to operate the car in a sports environment. Soft and, accordingly, tenacious rubber has a fairly low TW, which racers are guided by.
Surely you have a reasonable question about how the wear resistance index correlates with mileage. TW appeared thanks to the specialists of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). To calculate it, the tire at the test site is compared with a special sample, the TW of which is already known.
According to the methodology, the TW100 is equivalent to 48,000 mileage until the tires are completely worn out, that is, Nokian Hakka Green, for example, having a TW400, is capable of serving up to 192,000 kilometers. True, in the real world, wear is influenced by many factors that we talked about above, as well as driving style. Therefore, the results of calculations for TW are recommended to be divided by two. It turns out 96 thousand, or almost 5 years of operation, provided that in the warm season the car drives about 20 thousand kilometers.
In total, we have three parameters that should help with understanding how long tires will last if they are used correctly, and also tell you when to send a set of tires to the scrap and take care of buying new ones. This can be done on the Kolesa.kz portal using the search form in the "Spare Parts" section.
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A car tire is a rubber elastic shell that is mounted on a disc rim.
It is she who is in direct contact with the surface of the roadway and is directly designed to reduce small fluctuations on the roads, as well as to compensate for flaws in the trajectory of the wheels. During operation, it is subjected to heavy loads of a diverse nature, therefore it naturally has its own service life, which is influenced by a number of factors.
Expiration date is the period during which the company guarantees the possibility of using the product for its intended purpose and bears full responsibility for defects that arose through its fault.
When buying tires, you need to look so that no more than three years have passed from the moment of production. The date of manufacture and any other information is very easy to find out, it is indicated on the tire label among the general information about dimensions, design, speed and load ratings.
Tire production date
Russian legislation establishes the service life of car tires under warranty in accordance with GOST 4754-97 and GOST 5513 - 5 years from the date of manufacture, but for tires, first of all, the main indicator is the quality of the product, not time its use.
According to GOST, the average tire life should be calculated in the following order:
Experts recommend replacing tires before they reach their expiration date. Some motorists believe that rubber is suitable if it is rarely used, and at the same time its age is already 5-6 years old, but this is an erroneous opinion! Indeed, due to the fact that defects appear in tires during operation and storage, they are associated with its oxidation and cracking - at a critical moment, it can let you down.
Shelf life is a certain period during which the product, subject to the established rules of storage and operation, must retain all its properties.
If the shelf life has expired, this does not mean at all that the product is unsuitable for use, but its technical characteristics may decrease.
Tires can age through physical and chemical processes, this hypothesis applies to tires that are not used or little used. To prevent the aging process itself, special substances are added to the rubber compound that help counteract harmful chemical compounds with oxygen and ozone. Doing so will ensure that, when stored properly, the tire will meet the definition of a new tyre.
It should be noted that the warranty shelf life is not the service life of . The storage period for five years is set, not because the tire will deteriorate after that, but because, according to the law, the manufacturer does not have the right to establish a shorter warranty period, which is protection for the end user.
In recent years, many American experts believe that the shelf life and operation of car tires should be limited to 10 years.
In turn, German experts believe that the expiration date of tires should be limited to 6 years, this also applies to new tires.
Rules and regulations for the storage of pneumatic tires according to GOST 24779-81:
Avoid direct contact with a heat source, do not leave in direct sunlight at a humidity of less than 80%. For a complete list of rules and recommendations for proper tire storage, see the article “How to store car tires”.
Well-known brands of imported tires, such as: Bridgestone, Michelin, Goodyear and Dunlop last up to 10 years or more from the date of manufacture, this period is generally accepted throughout the world. But the total shelf life and storage in the warehouse, from the date of issue, tires Continental is no more than 5 years.
Although, as we have already figured out, the storage conditions of tires mean a lot, not only new ones, but also those that were removed from the car until the next season. For example, nokian 9 tire expiration date0098 ranges from 3-5 years, subject to verification at least 1 time per year, after 5 years of use.
Unfortunately, the legislation does not establish the permissible storage periods for tires in a warehouse, but experts believe that a tire that has lain there for about 5 years is still equal to a new one.
The tire life of a vehicle is the period of time during which the manufacturer gives a guarantee for tires and is fully responsible for any defects that will be detected during their operation.
According to manufacturers, tires should last at least ten years, although in practice they have to be replaced approximately every 5-6 years, in some cases even less.
There are many different factors that affect the wear of car tires, the main ones are listed below:
Next, let's take a closer look at the instructions for certain actions that need to be taken in case of wear on car tires.
When diagnosing tires, in addition to the fact that it is imperative to pay attention to the degree of wear, there are also other equally important factors indicating the end of the service life.
In order to determine when the life of car tires ends with a detailed inspection, you need to pay attention to the following points:
Otherwise, if the tread edge is worn on only one side, then the camber-toe angle has been violated. When any defects were noticed in the tires, it is recommended to carry out a replacement, and not a rescue restoration, in order to somehow delay the period of use.
To prolong the life of car tires, it is necessary to periodically diagnose them.
In order to make your tires last longer, you need to follow certain rules of use:
Since there is always more wear on the front (driving) wheels, then every 10-15 times. thousand or at the time of changing seasonal tires, it is advisable to change it in places.
Swapping front tires to rear tires
Scheme of swapping 5 car wheels
Please note that although there are tires with directional and non-directional patterns, you still cannot change the direction of rotation of the wheel.
And in the second option, the front wheels must be reboarded before being installed back.
It is necessary to check if the tires are correctly installed in relation to the rims, which is usually indicated on the sidewalls of the tires, this is important, since if the tires rotate in the opposite direction to the design, all their performance will be significantly reduced in all modes of operation of the car.
Non-directional tire replacement scheme
All-wheel drive tire replacement scheme
Experts recommend that you regularly check the condition of your tires, monitor pressure and tread wear. After all, it is much more profitable to fix a malfunction in the early stages than to change all the rubber later.
