Every car owner understands and recognises the important role tyres play in the safety and performance of their cars. Tyres are useful in not only ensuring that the vehicle continues to have a proper grip on the road but also helping the car distribute its weight across all four wheels accordingly. Thus, one can’t ignore the tyres if he wants to enjoy a comfortable and safe ride. However, many times, when someone has to replace tyres, they often try to buy a single tyre instead of replacing all four tyres. In this case, the car ends up getting a mixed set of tyres which can be pretty harmful. If you want to know why matching all four tyres on a car is so important, you should read the following blog.
Risks of Mismatched tyres
Before moving forward with the importance of matching tyres on a vehicle, let us take a minute to understand the risk mixed or mismatched tyres carry:
Improper Handling: When driving with mismatched tyres, your control of the car reduces a lot. This makes steering unreliable and hard, making the handling of the car very difficult, especially at a tight corner or while braking at a faster speed.
Poor Traction: If you use mismatched tyres, you may end up with tyres that feature different tread patterns and designs. This can effectively impact the traction of your car, thus resulting in poor road grip.
Uneven Wear and Tear: Since all four tyres are not identical, they will offer varying levels of wear and tear. Some tyres will even wear faster than others. However, when this happens, the other tyres are also affected and undergo increased friction, thus resulting in wear and tear.
Puts Strain on the Engine: Using different tyres on a vehicle will result in a much higher rolling resistance, as there will be inconsistency in the tyre tread. This will put a huge strain on the engine, as it has to burn more fuel to make the tyres roll.
Lowers Fuel Efficiency: Lastly, mismatched tyres will also lower the fuel efficiency of the vehicle.
How Does Using Matching Tyres Help?
All the issues discussed above can be easily mitigated by simply ensuring that you use matching tyres on all wheels. There is a reason car manufacturers recommend the tyres type, size, speed rating, and load index for a vehicle. It is because, after extensive research, such tyre dimensions are deemed optimal for the car. Thus, as long as you use proper matching tyres, you are less likely to encounter any trouble.
Also, you should know that you can still ignore the brand to some extent, but at the very least, you have to make sure to use the same tyre types, sizes, load index, and speed rating on all four wheels of your car.
Balanced Traction
Traction is the force that makes your tyre grip the road properly. If you use matching tyres, this force will be applied equally to all the tyres, hence achieving a balance that will equally distribute the weight of the car across all the wheels and also lessen the stress on the car engine. However, when you use mismatched tyres, this balance gets broken, resulting in faster wear and tear of the tyres due to more stress and more fuel consumption to generate the required force that can make the wheels rotate.
So if you require replacing your tyres, try to get all four Michelin tyres in Walsall instead of mix-matching different tyre types.
Even Wear and Tear
As we have repeatedly mentioned, mismatched tyres tend to wear out much faster than matching tyres. This happens due to several reasons. First, matching tyres are necessary for balancing the weight of the vehicle equally. If not, some of the tyres will be under more stress, which will cause them to wear out faster. This will result in more differences between the existing tyres and the tyres with good tread will have to bear the brunt, resulting in them wearing out too. So, if you want to save money on tyre replacement, then you should be extra careful when buying new tyres. If possible, you can try to enquire about wholesale tyres prices to buy all four tyres at once. This way you can ensure matching tyres for your wheels.
Better Braking
When you are using matching tyres, you will experience far better braking. This happens because all the tyres provide the same road grip and thus are able to perform efficiently, resulting in a cohesive stopping distance as the braking force is evenly distributed amongst these tyres.
Improved Fuel Efficiency
As you might know, tyres are responsible for your fuel efficiency to a certain extent. Every tyre has a resistance force, called the rolling resistance, that prevents the tyres from moving. The engine has to generate a certain amount of energy for these tyres to move. However, this rolling resistance can increase or decrease based on several factors as well, one of which is imbalance due to mismatching tyres. When this happens, your engine has to burn more fuel to generate the required force to move the car.
More Stability
When you drive with mismatched tyres, your car becomes harder to control due to improper weight balancing, and this results in uneven wear and tear. This uneven wear makes the car more difficult to steer, hence impacting the stability of a drive. This can be pretty dangerous, especially when you are driving at a much higher speed. Thus, to ensure the stability of the vehicle, you should always use matching tyres on a car.
Less Engine Stress
Lastly, you should be aware that using mismatched tyres can put a lot of strain on your engine as well as several other mechanical components, such as suspension or steering. The components of your car are made to work in tandem with matching tyres; thus, any deviation can cause undue stress on them. Take the engine, for example. Driving with mismatched tyres can cause the engine to burn more fuel in order to move the car.
