Open the driver's door and there is a label on the shut or the pillar with a small table printed on it. Most people who have ever looked at it read the first column and stop. There is nearly always a second one, and it is for a car carrying a full load: passengers in the back, a boot with something substantial in it, or a long run at sustained speed. The figures in that column are higher, particularly for the rear, and hardly anybody uses them.
The difference is not a rounding error. A rear tyre asked to carry a heavy load at the light setting runs with more sidewall flex than it was designed for, which makes the car feel vague at exactly the moment it is heaviest, wears the shoulders and puts heat into the casing on the one journey of the year that is long enough for heat to matter. The same label carries the other numbers worth knowing when you are buying: the size the car was approved with, the load index and the speed rating. Those are the specification, not a suggestion, and a tyre one step down on load index will look identical on the shelf. Read the label before you ring rather than after the tyres are on the ground.
Whether the car is on the drive in Kennington Park or a side street in Kennington, the fitting happens there. If you would rather we came to you on Kennington Road at the end of the working day, that is fine too. The The Oval phone and the Vauxhall phone ring the same fitter, any hour. Midnight in Vauxhall, midday in the Cleaver Square area, the same call either way. A SE11 address in Kennington and one in The Oval are the same round.
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Cars in SE11 spend most of their lives on short journeys with nobody in the back, then get properly loaded two or three times a year, which is the precise pattern the second column exists for. The label lives in the door shut, so you can read it standing on the pavement while the car is in its bay without moving anything. If you are ordering tyres, read the size, the load index and the speed rating from there rather than from the sidewalls, because the sidewalls only tell you what somebody fitted last time.
A driver going away for a fortnight with four people aboard had never noticed the second column existed. The rears were set for an empty car and had been for years, including on every long trip the car had ever made.
A tyre fitted elsewhere matched the size on the label exactly and carried a lower load index than the car was approved with. Same numbers on the sidewall until you reached the ones that mattered.
A set ordered for a car parked near Cleaver Square, with the owner reading the size, load index and speed rating off the door shut while we were on the phone. It took about a minute and removed every possible misunderstanding.
One is for normal use with a light load, the other for a fully laden car or a long run at speed. The higher figures mainly affect the rear, because that is where the extra weight sits. If you are loading the car up for a trip, that second column is the one to use.
Yes, once the car is empty again, otherwise you are running higher pressures than it needs for daily use. It is a two minute job at an air line and it is worth doing at both ends of a long trip rather than only at the start.
It is a code on the sidewall corresponding to the maximum weight that tyre can carry at its rated pressure. It matters a great deal. The car was approved with a particular index and anything below it is carrying more than it was built to, which is not something you would ever notice until it mattered.
The handbook carries the same information, and on some cars the figures are printed inside the fuel filler flap instead. Failing that, we can work from the vehicle itself. What we will not do is guess from the tyres already fitted, since those may well be wrong already.
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