Your tires will gradually wear out and will eventually need replacement. While it’s impossible to prevent tire wear, you can reduce its impact on your tires and delay the need to replace them. As your Chevy dealer, we want to give you a few tips on tire maintenance that will help prevent avoidable early tire replacement.
Tire Maintenance Tips From Your Chevy Dealer
Check Tire Pressure Regularly
Regularly checking your tire pressure helps keep your tires in good condition. Your front and rear tires have specific pressure requirements, and their pressures are listed in your car manual. They can also be found on a sticker or a metal plate in the inside door jamb on the front passenger side door. Tires that are correctly pressurized will suffer less surface friction damage.
Underinflated tires droop slightly, exposing the softer and weaker sidewalls to fiction. In this situation, you’ll see excessive smooth bands of wear around the outer edges of the tread and lower sections of the sidewalls. Overinflated tires, in contrast, show excessive wearing in the center of the tread, as the increased pressure pulls the outer edges of the tire away from the surface. We can test your tire pressure and correct it within minutes.
Tire Rotations
The tire tread gradually wears down. Some of the wear is naturally occurring due to constant contact with the surface, but other factors can also cause wear damage. Wheel misalignment or incorrect tire balances increase damage to specific sections of the tread. Tires also develop increased wear due to their position on your Chevy.
A tire rotation will reduce wear damage, as each tire is moved to a new position. The positions the tires move to depend on your drivetrain. Moving the tires to new positions spreads wear and tear more evenly across the tires and extends their life. Our technicians can easily rotate your tires for you.
Look For Damage
Sharp objects on the road can penetrate a tire surface and cause a leak. A bubble could form on the sidewall of a tire that has been pinched against a hard object. The tire bubble is easily noticeable, and it makes the tire potentially dangerous to drive on. The air inside a tire heats up as you drive, and if the air in the bubble heats up enough it can burst and cause a blowout.
Tire cracks can develop on the surface of older tires, as the rubber gradually loses its flexibility. Once a crack forms, it will widen and deepen and eventually cause a leak. We can repair leaks caused by sharp objects, but tire bubbles and cracks can’t be repaired. We’ll remove the damaged tires and install and balance new ones for you.
If you’d like to know more about maintaining your tires, contact us today at Ted Britt Chevrolet in Sterling, VA.
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