Low mileage does not mean good tyres. Rubber ages whether the car moves or not, and a set that has sat through six or seven summers can be perished long before the tread is anywhere near worn out. You see it as fine cracking in the sidewall and down inside the tread grooves, a crazed pattern rather like old paint, and it means the compound has hardened and lost a good deal of its grip in the wet.
Cars kept in SW1 are particularly prone to it, because a lot of them do short journeys and then sit for long stretches in between. There is a four digit code moulded into the sidewall giving the week and the year the tyre was made, and on plenty of low mileage cars it comes as a genuine surprise to the owner. We read it, look at the state of the rubber alongside it and tell you honestly whether it is age or something else.
You will get a straight driveable-or-not answer before anything else happens. A broken tyre is usually a slow discovery rather than a bang: a kerb strike, a pothole on a road like Vauxhall Bridge Road, a cut picked up who knows where, a bulge spotted while it sat parked up in Belgravia. The wheel comes off in the Ebury Street area, not on a ramp in Pimlico. Nothing is towed out of Westminster or Grosvenor Gardens; the work finishes there.
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A lot of cars around Westminster and the Belgravia fringe cover a few thousand miles a year and spend the rest of the time parked, which is exactly the pattern that ages tyres out before it wears them out. Nobody thinks to check a date code on a car that barely moves. It takes ten seconds and it occasionally saves a very unpleasant surprise in the wet.
A carefully kept car near Belgravia still had over half its tread and date codes from a decade earlier. The sidewalls were crazed right through, so the tyres were replaced on condition rather than on depth.
An owner off Ebury Street had spotted cracking on the sidewall. The bottom of the tread grooves was in worse condition, which is the part nobody looks at and the part that tells you most.
A tyre losing pressure slowly on a car in Pimlico had no puncture in it at all. The rubber around the bead had hardened with age and was no longer sealing properly against the rim.
It is a four digit number inside an oval on the sidewall. The first two digits are the week and the last two are the year, so 3419 means the thirty fourth week of 2019. Worth knowing on a car that covers few miles.
There is no single legal figure for an ordinary car, so it comes down to condition. What we look at is cracking, hardening and how the rubber behaves, rather than the number on its own.
Not on its own. Tread depth tells you about wear and nothing at all about the state of the compound. A tyre can be perfectly legal on depth and still be past useful life because the rubber has gone hard.
No. A repair bonds to sound rubber, and perished rubber is the opposite of that. If a tyre has cracked through, the answer is replacement, and we would rather say so than patch it and hope for the best.
Gladly, and it is worth doing. Spares sit untouched for years and are very often the oldest rubber on the car, which is a poor thing to discover at the roadside on a wet night.
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