Maintaining Your Car's Tire Pressure: A Great Investment in Your Car

When the manufacturer of a car gets to outfitting a new model with tires to cope with its abilities, the main considerations usually are axle weight, the kind of use the vehicle is likely to be put to, and the largest size of tire the vehicle's design will permit. Finding the right balance between these considerations helps a vehicle designer pick the tire that will offer the right capacity, certainly, but that will also offer adequate handling and drivability, along with safety and good looks. Tires on a vehicle are rarely only about sturdy load-bearing capacity.

Load-bearing capacity is hardly as simple as it seems. The tire chosen for a vehicle needs to do more than to simply carry the weight the vehicle and its payload together add up to: the weight of the vehicle multiplies considerably when the vehicle travels at high speeds. In addition, a tire, in order to be able to last long, needs to be designed with much greater ability than it will actually ever be subjected to.

All vehicles manufactured in the past 20 years or so display at a prominent place on the body of the vehicle a guide on how to inflate the tires to the recommended pressure. While most manufacturers display this information in places like the vehicle's glove compartment or the fuel cap, others display this information in the owner's manual. If a car owner decides to take a little liberty with the tire inflation pressures to use, he can change the way the entire vehicle behaves.

On the usual city road terrain, under-inflating a vehicle's tires by only a couple of units can cause all kinds of trouble. To begin with, the tire and the tread on it would last up to a quarter less than a properly inflated tire. The walls of an under inflated tire also flex a lot more as they roll, in a way that happens to heat it up with friction. All this action spells poor fuel economy. Driving such a car often elicits comments such as how the driver experience is one of poor handling, poor ability to aim the vehicle precisely, and others like these.

Over-inflation though can be much more injurious to the health of your tires. The smallest sharp-edged pothole or rock on the street could shred the extra hard surface of an overinflated tire. A hard-inflated tire in addition can perform less well at soaking up bumps and other surface unevenness: bumps and road roughness are directly transmitted to the passenger cabin. But there is a positive side to what you can expect inflating your tires a little on the high side: extra hard inflation can often bring on the fringe benefit of greater responsiveness and surefooted cornering. It is not uncommon for participants at street race events to run on punishingly hard tires.

Tire pressures are not ever known to stay exactly as you leave them; ambient temperature, running conditions and time all have their effect on the kind of inflation a tire will have. Tires will ordinarily for no fault of theirs, lose about one psi unit of air pressure every three or four weeks. If you left your car loan for three months and returned to check them, you would be surprised to find that you lost about three psi units in that time. Ambient temperature has a very noticeable effect on tire pressure too. For about every 10°F change in the ambient temperature, a change of one psi in the pressure in your tires should be noticeable. If you happen to inflate your tires down south where the temperature is 90°F and try to up North where the temperature is no more than 30°F you'll suddenly find your tires are seriously under inflated.

With the effects of changes in time and temperature ever present, you have no choice if you wish to keep safe inflation levels in your tires, other than to check your tire pressure gauge often and make corrective changes. Frequent checks alert you to the presence of any small leak there might be in a tire; a stitch in time saves nine. Why, poorly maintained tire pressure levels can wear your tires out in ways that the service center can tell during in-warranty checkups; such treatment of your car can often cause forfeiture of your warranty coverage too. Check your tires with a pressure gauge once a week; a couple of minutes a week should be a great investment in your safety in the safety of your car.