A tyre starts ageing on the day it is cured, not on the day it is fitted, and how much of that ageing has already happened depends mostly on how popular the size is. A common fitment for an ordinary family car moves through a distributor in weeks, because thousands of them are called for. An unusual width for a large 4x4, or an odd speed rating that only a handful of cars use, can sit on a rack for years simply because nothing came along asking for it. Neither tyre has been mistreated. One has just had a very much longer wait.
That wait is usually where a remarkably keen price comes from. Old stock is stock somebody wants gone, and the discount is the cost of it having stood there. It is not a scandal and it is not automatically a bad buy, but it ought to be something you know rather than something you find out, because the rubber has spent those years slowly hardening whether or not anybody was driving on it. The four digits moulded in an oval on the sidewall give the week and the year of manufacture. Ask for them before you commit, online or over a counter. We stock the sizes that actually move around here, which is the simplest protection there is.
Front tyres wear first, and hills and stop-start traffic make it worse. Anywhere with a lot of braking and turning, Warwick Road included, chews the outer shoulders long before the middle of the tread goes. Nothing is towed out of Redcliffe or Old Brompton Road; the work finishes there. Pressures set before we leave Old Brompton Road, and the same on Cromwell Road.
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There is a lot of turnover in SW5, with cars changing hands as often as flats do, so plenty of the vehicles parked around Warwick Road are on tyres chosen by somebody the owner has never met. If you have bought a car recently it is worth reading all four dates before you replace anything, because they very often do not match and the oldest of them may be considerably older than the tread depth suggests. It takes a couple of minutes with a torch and it tells you what you have actually inherited.
A driver near Redcliffe found one supplier far cheaper than everyone else on an unusual rear size. The tyres were sound and correctly stored, and they were also four years old, which explained the whole of the difference.
A set arrived with a faint brown film across the sidewalls and the owner assumed they were spoiled. That is the anti-ozone wax working its way to the surface, which is exactly what it is meant to do, and it wipes off.
A car bought secondhand off Old Brompton Road turned out to have four tyres made across a five year spread. Nothing was unsafe, but the oldest was well past the point where anyone would have chosen it.
Because new means unused rather than recently made, and how long a tyre waits depends on how many people ask for its size. Popular fitments turn over in weeks. Unusual widths and ratings can sit on a rack for years without anyone doing anything wrong. The only way to know is to look at the date.
Cool, dry and dark, out of direct sunlight, away from solvents and away from anything with an electric motor in it, because those generate ozone and ozone attacks rubber. Stored properly on a rack rather than crushed under weight, a tyre ages slowly. Stored badly it ages very much faster.
A year or two makes no practical difference at all and is completely normal. Beyond about three years it is fair to expect the price to reflect the shelf time, and worth asking why it was still sitting there. It is a negotiation, not a disqualification, as long as you know what you are being offered.
Anti-ozone wax migrating out of the rubber to the surface, where it forms a protective film. It is a designed behaviour rather than a fault and it wipes away. You often see more of it on a tyre that has waited a while, which is a soft hint about age rather than a defect.
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