The legal minimum is 1.6mm, across the central three quarters of the tread and right round the tyre. What catches people out is the quarter the law leaves out, because the inner shoulder is the first strip to go on a car whose alignment has been knocked out, and it is the one part of a tyre you never see. A tyre can look perfectly respectable from the pavement and be down to the belt an inch in from the edge.
Turn the steering onto full lock and look at the inside edge of the front tyre. If the tread blocks have gone feathered, one side of each block will stand sharp and proud while the other is rounded off. Run a hand across it and it feels smooth one way and like a bread knife the other. That is toe error rather than ordinary wear, and it means the wheels are being dragged very slightly sideways every mile you drive. The tyre is only the symptom. Replace it without dealing with the cause and you buy the same worn edge again inside a year.
The cost of getting it wrong is a tow, and a tow costs more than the tyre. We bring the correct size to Dormers Wells or wherever the car is, fit and balance it on the spot and check the alloy while the wheel is off. Old tyres leave Dormers Wells, The Broadway and UB1 with us, every time. You watch it happen in The Broadway, or at the kerb in the Western Road area.
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Alignment does not survive this borough for long. Kerbing while squeezing into a space on a narrow street, and the sunken covers and broken edges at the busier junctions, are each enough to shift the tracking a fraction. Nothing feels different afterwards. The only evidence is a strip of inner shoulder wearing away faster than the rest, and it takes somebody looking at the right part of the tyre to catch it.
Nobody spots this walking round the car, which is why it tends to turn up at a service or a test as a nasty surprise. Two minutes with the steering turned tells you where a tyre really stands.
A hard hit where the surface has broken up will shift the tracking without leaving a mark that anybody notices. The tyre then quietly grinds its inner edge away over the months that follow.
An inner edge flagged as an advisory last year is very often the reason for a failure this year, because nothing was done about what caused it. Caught early it is one tyre rather than two.
Like a saw. Drag your palm across the tread from the outside in and it is smooth; drag it back the other way and every block catches at your hand. If you can feel that, the geometry has been out for a good while.
Because the wheel is not pointing precisely where the car is going. A degree or two of toe or camber error puts nearly all the load onto one shoulder, and that shoulder does the scrubbing while the rest of the tread still looks new.
If the other side still has good even tread, yes. What matters more is having the alignment checked afterwards, because geometry cannot be set at the kerb and a new tyre on a car that is out of line wears exactly the same way.
Yes. Full lock swings the inside face out where it can be seen properly, and if the space is too tight even for that, the wheel comes off. That takes a couple of minutes and settles the question either way.
That hides the problem rather than solving it. Putting a badly worn tyre on the rear leaves your least reliable rubber on the axle that decides whether the back of the car steps out in the wet. It is the wrong way round.
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