About Auto Care: Why You Need snow Tires during winter

February 13, 2013

Understanding how winter tires out perform all season tires you will have to understand what is underneath all that snow and how the pavement changes drastically during the cold months of winter. It becomes a very irregular landscape with sharp points, deep valleys and when your car rolls along these two different surface rubber and the road meet, they must interface for a good grip.

Snow tires with its rubber compounds are a softer rubber that allows the tire to have more flexibility and flexible enough to wiggle and fit into the microscopic grooves in the pavement. This allows the winter tires to perform and achieve the maximum contact and use all of its surface to push off as it moves forward. The winter tire much more flexible, if it was not, it would never be able to get into the grooves in the pavement.

Winter tires will last a good 4 years, possibly 5 years, just because you have great looking thread on your tires will not mean that the tires will perform to what they originally where forecast to do. The reason is the compound find in the rubber over time will get hard, making the tire unsafe for winter driving and more then likely hydro plane in wet, slushy and snowy conditions, the tire will no longer have the flexibility it once had.

It is important that you have your tires checked each winter before having them installed, taking it to an authorize tire dealer is the best choice they understand how winter tires perform and what to look for in tires that may not meet the future winter conditions of the up coming year. A rule of thumb is they should last a good 4 to 5 years before they become unreliable and unsafe for winter driving.

Once a week is a good habit to check all of your tires PSI making sure that they have the correct tire pressure on each wheel. when the temperature drops, your tires will lose some air making them unbalance with the specification of the manufactures specs. Always take the PSI from inside the drivers door, you will see a yellow stick with tire pressure and other information, never use what a tire says as the PSI.

If you follow the simple steps of checking your tire PSI once a week during winter, as your doing that look at the tire for any visible unbalanced ware and tear on your tires indicating that you may need a front wheel alignment or something is not functioning correctly. You can purchase a good tire pressure monitor for less then $10.00 a very wise investment.