How Your Driving Habits Are Destroying Your Tyres: The Complete Guide

Your driving style greatly affects tyre wear, actually. The same tyres on equal vehicles can get varied wear depending on who's behind the steering wheel. Aggressive drivers can discard a new set of tyres after 15,000 miles, whereas gentle ones can stretch the same tyres for as much as 40,000 miles! When you understand how your everyday driving habits translate into tyre wear, you can save yourself hundreds of pounds and secure a safer road journey. Just a few changes in your driving style will greatly enhance Car Tyres Walsall life.

The Big Four: Habits That Kill Tyres Fast

There are four ways to drive that cause mass destruction to tyres, and nearly every driver makes at least one habit without even realising the cost.

How Does Acceleration Wear Your Tyres?

The way you accelerate can give your tyres enormous wear, but it's not quite about ripping. It's about technique and knowing your car's limits.

A smooth, gradual acceleration allows the tyres to maintain grip and transfer power efficiently. The rubber is left in contact with the road, doing its job correctly without excessive wear.

Sudden acceleration, especially from traffic lights and roundabouts, can lead to an awful amount of wheel spin when a powerful car is involved or the roadside is wet. Once the wheels spin, your tyres act like sandpaper on tarmac, drying up fast with that characteristic burning rubber smell!

First and foremost, there is a great deal in learning about savings limits with the grip of a car. There will always be more than a point at which the tyres lose traction. Whereas expert drivers can feel the exact amount of throttle they can use without destroying traction, thereby going full throttle to accelerate fast, but never to the point of destroying the tyre.

Braking: The Silent Tyre Destroyer

Tyre wear due to braking is probably one of those things very few drivers really understand. While it's obvious that acceleration puts the tyres under stress, braking wear happens a little less obviously, more quietly.

Hard braking is the action that forces tyres to be rubbed against the road surface, creating friction to stop a car. The harder the braking, the more rubber gets worn away. This is why you see those black skid marks on the roads - they are actually tyre rubber being scraped off.

If someone keeps braking late and hard at every junction, traffic light, or roundabout, this will dramatically shorten tyre life. This type of wear not only ages your tyres quickly but also leads to uneven wearing patterns that can make the vehicle unsafe to drive.

The solution is to begin to anticipate stops and brake gently for longer distances, thereby applying less braking force on any of the tyres at once and allowing for a longer tyre life.

Cornering: In Which Tyres Really Suffer

Cornering is a serious factor in tyre wear, which is precisely where driving style really excels. Fast and aggressive cornering will significantly reduce tyre life within a few thousand miles.

When cornering at speed, your tyres have to generate lateral forces in order to change your car's direction.

The faster the speed during a cornering manoeuvre, the greater the force that must be sustained, and the greater the tyres' lateral sliding against the road surface.

This lateral motion of the tyres is scrubbing, where the tyre tread basically scrubs against the road surface. Most of the scrubbing forces act on the outer edges of the tyres, which is why hard drivers see tyre wear on the outer edges before the centre tread gets affected.

Speed Factor: Driving on a Freeway or City

Consider the type of driving environment one is engaged in; this will largely define tyre wear. Freeway driving is usually considered to be less harsh on tyres than city driving, but of course, speed is an important characteristic.

Constant high-speed tyre operation on the freeway generates heat in the tyre. This heat generation, however, produces no very visible wear on the tyre immediately after, because those times occur after the tyre compound's ability to resist heat breakdown has been reduced, making the tyre less effective and susceptible to sudden failure.

City driving is far more difficult for the tyres because the traffic causes so much stopping and starting. The constant accelerations and braking cycles create far more wear than would be generated by steady-speed driving. Give it a few tight parking manoeuvres and sharp turns, and in no time, the tyres for the city will be wearing a lot faster than those on the freeway.

Developing Tyre-Friendly Driving Habits

Changing driving habits is not about driving slowly and timidly; it is about smooth and efficient driving.

Try to anticipate traffic flow to avoid unnecessary braking and acceleration. Look ahead and plan your moves so that you maintain good, steady speeds without abrupt changes in direction.

Know your car's limitations and don't exceed them while driving normally; that is for track days, where you expect to wear out your tyres and plan for it.

Routine tyre maintenance will also help. Keep your tyres inflated, regularly check for damage, and if you notice uneven wear patterns, have your wheel alignment checked out.

The Bottom Line

Your driving habits have an astronomical effect on tyre wear, often more than the tyres themselves or the roads you drive on. Small adjustments to how you accelerate, brake or corner could double or triple your Goodyear Tyres Walsall life.