Two tyres in the same size can be built to carry very different weights. A reinforced tyre, marked XL or Extra Load and sometimes RF, has a stronger casing and a higher load index, and it is designed to run at higher pressures in order to use it. Heavier cars, most SUVs and a good many 4x4s leave the factory on them, and the pressures on the placard in the door assume that construction. A standard load tyre in the same size will bolt straight on, look identical from a few feet away and usually be the cheaper of the two.
What it will not do is carry the same weight. Run at the placard pressures with the car loaded, it is working above what its casing was certified for, and the way that shows up is heat in the sidewall, then fatigue, then a failure at speed on a long run with everybody on board. It is a quiet substitution and an easy one to make by accident, because nothing about the size printed on the sidewall gives it away. The load index does. It is the two digit number sitting just before the speed rating letter, and on a reinforced tyre it will be several points higher than on the standard version of the same size.
Recovery cover pays somebody to move the car. A mobile fitter finishes the job instead: one call, a technician sent to where you are stopped in Shepherd's Bush, stock already loaded, and the wheel back on before the recovery truck would have arrived. Tight in Uxbridge Road, easy in Askew Road: neither stops the job. Level in Wood Lane, sloping in Brackenbury: we set the car straight first.
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A lot of the heavier cars around Shepherd's Bush are used exactly as they were meant to be, loaded up and taken out along the A40 Westway rather than kept for short local trips, and that is the use where a reinforced casing earns its keep. The substitution usually happens far from home, in a hurry, when a tyre has to be found the same day. It is worth reading the load index on all four next time you have a quiet five minutes, because an odd one out is very hard to spot and impossible to feel from the driver's seat.
An SUV came to us with an odd tyre on one rear corner, fitted somewhere in a hurry. Same size as the other three, several load index points below them, and running the same pressures as though it were the same tyre.
The failure case is a heavy vehicle packed to the roof going out along the A40 Westway on a warm day. That is the load and the sustained speed a reinforced casing exists to handle, and the conditions a standard one was never certified for.
Before anything gets ordered we read the number off the old tyre and check it against the placard. It is a two digit figure with a letter after it, and it answers the question in a few seconds without any argument.
Extra Load, sometimes written as Reinforced or shortened to RF. The casing is built stronger and the tyre carries a higher load index, which it achieves at higher inflation pressures. Cars specified on them have placard pressures written for that construction rather than for a standard tyre.
It fits mechanically and it is rated to carry less. On a heavy car at the pressures the placard asks for, it runs nearer its ceiling all the time, and the margin you have given away is exactly the margin used up by a loaded car at speed on a warm day.
The placard in the driver's door shut gives the size, the load index and the speed rating. Compare that against what is moulded on each sidewall. If the numbers on the car do not match the numbers on the door, something has been substituted at some point in its life.
They are built to run at higher pressures than the standard equivalent, and the figures the car maker gives already account for that. What you should never do is take pressures from one construction and apply them to the other, which is how a substituted tyre ends up working hardest of all.
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