For many drivers, it’s “out of sight, out of mind” when it comes to maintaining the tires they have on their vehicle. Collectively, these attitude likely results in millions of dollars wasted every year. Tires, like any other component of your vehicle must be properly maintained in order to get longer life. The goal drivers should strive for in thinking of their tires is even tread wear among all tires. This will allow you to prevent the situation where you are replacing tires one at a time with a mixture of tire types and tread patterns. Keeping all tires on the same brand and tread pattern will allow you to achieve a quiet ride, better handling, and longer overall tire life.

The first piece of maintenance that you should have performed is an alignment. When a car is out of alignment all of the tires do not point straight ahead. This results in a slight sideways motion when your tire comes in contact with the pavement. When this happens, the pavement acts like sandpaper and slowly grinds your tire away. Over several thousands of miles, this increases the wear that is put on your tire and decreases the amount of time until you will have to replace one or more of your tires. Driving with improper alignment can easily reduce the life of your tires by half.

Secondly, you should rotate and balance your tires every 5,000 miles. Vehicles are not perfect they have different amounts of weight sitting on each tire when the vehicle is sitting still and has no passengers. Compound that fact by adding in various type of driving, terrain, and passenger loads and it becomes easy to see how one tire can become more worn than the others. Rotating the tires allows us to us the law of averages to even out the amount of strain that is placed on each tire.

Doing these two simple steps could easily extend the life of your tires from 30 or 40 thousand miles to 50 or 60 thousand miles. This could save you hundreds or even thousands in replacement costs over the life of your car. Many automotive shops also offer lifetime rotation, balance, and alignment services as add ons when you purchase a set of tires.