Turn the front wheels to full lock and look at the inside edge of the tyres. If that inner band is bald while the middle and outer edge still have plenty left, the tyre did not wear out. Something is holding the wheel at an angle and dragging it along the road on one shoulder. A single worn strip on the inner edge is usually camber. Feathering, smooth one way under your hand and sharp the other, is toe. Neither is age, and neither is cured by buying a tyre.
It matters because the new one goes the same way on the same car, often inside a year. The cause here is rarely dramatic. A slow shunt into a kerb while reversing into a tight bay is enough to shift a suspension arm by a millimetre, and a millimetre is all it takes. So when we come out to a damaged tyre we read the wear as well as the damage. Alignment is not a kerbside job, it wants a laser rig and a level floor, but you get told plainly what the tyre has been saying so you are not buying the same tyre twice.
There is a short list of damage that cannot be repaired at any price, and it is worth knowing it. Anything in the sidewall or the shoulder. Kerbside on Curtain Road or on your own drive, the visit is identical. A Curtain Road cul-de-sac or a the Rivington Street area main road, tell us which. A tight terrace in Redchurch Street or a narrow bay on Great Eastern Street is usually workable.
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Cars in this neighbourhood do short journeys and an enormous amount of manoeuvring, which is hard on geometry and easy to miss entirely. Nudging a wheel against a kerb while reversing into a space near the Boundary Estate barely registers at the time, and the cobbled sections do the rest. If one corner is wearing at twice the rate of the others, that is worth looking at before you spend anything on rubber.
You can diagnose feathering with your hand faster than with a gauge. Run it across the tread blocks in both directions. If the edges are ramped, the toe setting is wrong and the tyre is being scrubbed sideways every mile.
A front tyre replaced in the spring was down to the cords on the inside band by the autumn. That is not a bad tyre or a heavy right foot. That is geometry, and it will do it again to the next one.
Fine cracking all round the sidewall is age and sunlight, not mileage. It turns up on cars that sit in the same bay for weeks, and it is one of the few faults where a low reading on the tread gauge means nothing.
You can, and it will wear the same way. If the pattern says the geometry is out, a tyre is a consumable you are choosing to spend twice. Get the alignment sorted first and the new tyre lasts as long as it should.
No, and anybody offering to do it properly on a public road is guessing. It needs a level surface and measuring equipment. We will tell you what the wear indicates so you can book the right job instead of the wrong one.
There is a four digit code on the sidewall in an oval. First two digits are the week, last two are the year. It is worth a look on any car that does low mileage, because rubber ages whether the wheels turn or not.
Because the legal measurement only covers the middle band. A tyre can pass a gauge in the centre and be down to the casing on the inner shoulder, where nobody looks, and that edge is carrying the load through every corner.
It can, on two counts: tread below the limit anywhere in the measured band, or exposed cords and abnormal wear caused by a fault. A tester lifts the car and sees the inner edge, which is the bit you never get a proper view of on the drive.
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