Width is the specification people change first and understand least. A wider tyre puts more rubber on the road, which is worth having in the dry, and it costs you in several places at once. Steering gets heavier at parking speeds. Road noise climbs. In standing water a wider contact patch has more water to shift out of the way, so it aquaplanes sooner rather than later. And the car begins to tramline.
Tramlining is what happens when a wide tread finds the ruts, grooves and patched edges in a road surface and follows those instead of following the steering. You feel it as the car tugging left and right on its own along a worn stretch, and as a constant need to correct. It has nothing to do with alignment and it is not a fault. It is a wide, stiff tyre doing exactly what a wide, stiff tyre does on a surface like Evelyn Street. On smooth roads a wider tyre is a fine thing. On worn, rutted, patched tarmac it is very often the reason a car feels tiring to drive, and going back to the width the manufacturer specified is the usual cure.
Give us the size and we will tell you what we can bring, which is the honest way round. From that we can say what is available in premium, mid-range and budget, what each costs, and when we could be with you in SE8. Nothing is towed out of Evelyn or the Creek area; the work finishes there. Pressures set before we leave New Cross, and the same on Creek Road. A SE8 address in New Cross and one in Greenwich are the same round.
New tyres in Deptford is part of our wider mobile tyre fitting cover. For new tyres in Deptford, call 07717 389637 or send us your details for a price.
The nearside lanes on Evelyn Street and New Cross Road are rutted from years of heavy traffic and patched in strips where the surface has been dug up and made good. That is tramlining country. A car on the width it was designed for tracks straight through it, while a car on something wider fidgets the whole way and the driver spends the journey making small corrections without really noticing. If your car has started to feel busy in the hands around here, the tyres are worth looking at before the steering is.
A driver who had gone a size wider on the fronts found the car wandering along rutted stretches of the A2. Returning to the specified width took the tugging out of the steering completely.
Heavy rain and a rutted nearside lane is where a wide tyre is at its least impressive, because the water has further to travel before the tread reaches the road. The specified size copes with that better than a fashionable one.
A car offered from new in two widths. The narrower option was quieter, lighter in the hands and better in the wet, and gave up almost nothing that mattered on roads like these.
In the dry, on a smooth surface, a wider tyre gives more grip. Everywhere else it is a trade. You get heavier steering, more noise, earlier aquaplaning in standing water and more tramlining on rutted roads. Whether that trade is worth making depends almost entirely on where you actually drive.
It is the car following grooves and ruts in the road rather than your steering. A wide tread bridges more of the surface, so ridges and patched edges push it sideways and you correct constantly. It shows up most on worn nearside lanes and on surfaces that have been repaired in strips.
Not something we would encourage without a real reason. The width has to suit the rim, there has to be clearance on full lock and through suspension travel, and the handling was developed around the original size. If you want a change in feel, there are better levers to pull than width.
On roads like these the narrower of the two is usually the more pleasant car: lighter steering, less noise, better behaved in the wet and far less inclined to follow ruts. The wider one earns its keep on smooth fast roads in the dry, which is not most of what happens here.
★★★★★ 4.9 from 151 verified Google reviews.
Read all 151 reviews on Google →Prefer a callback? Send your details for a new tyres price in Deptford.