There are three figures on the label that comes with a new tyre, and the one at the bottom is the one nobody reads. It is a noise figure in decibels, and it is measured properly: the tyre is rolled past a microphone at a set speed with the engine off, so the number describes the sound the tread makes on the road and nothing else. Decibels are logarithmic, which is where the figure catches people out. A difference of three is not a difference of three per cent, it is roughly twice the sound energy, and two tyres in the same size sitting on the same shelf can be that far apart.
Where you notice it is not at speed on a dual carriageway. It is at thirty or forty on a coarse surface with buildings close on both sides, which describes most of the crawl along City Road, and it arrives through the floor rather than through the windscreen. A tread with big open blocks and wide shoulder gaps pumps air in and out of the pattern as it rolls, and that pumping is most of the noise. Quieter tyres vary the length of the blocks around the circumference so the pattern never settles into one note. Read us the size and we will tell you which tyres in it are the quiet ones.
A tyre change is painless when two things are true. You pick premium, mid-range or budget on the phone; we bring it to the car in EC1V at an hour you agreed to and fit it where it stands. The wheel comes off in City Road, not on a ramp in Clerkenwell. Nothing is towed out of the Bunhill Fields area or St Luke's; the work finishes there.
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Cars in this part of town spend their lives at low speed between hard surfaces. Glass, brick and a road that is never quiet reflect tyre noise straight back at you, so a loud tread is genuinely louder here than the same tread would be on an open road. The A501 supplies more than enough noise already without the car adding to it from underneath. If a set is being chosen anyway, the noise figure costs nothing at all to look at, and it is one of the few things on the label you will notice every single day you drive.
Two tyres offered for one car, both the correct size and rating, with a gap between their noise figures wide enough to be obvious on the first drive. The quieter of the two was not the dearer of the two, which is often how it works out.
A driver was convinced something underneath the car was failing, because the roar had appeared more or less overnight. It had appeared with a set of budget tyres fitted the week before, and the tread pattern was doing all of it.
The car sat in the same bay from eight until six anyway, so the set went on where it stood while the owner worked. The old tyres left with us and nobody lost an afternoon to a waiting room.
Sound from outside the car, recorded as the tyre rolls past a microphone with the engine switched off. It is not a measurement of what reaches the driving seat, but the two track each other closely enough that it is the best guide available before you have bought anything.
Not automatically. Wet grip is rated separately on the same label and there are plenty of tyres that do well on both. Where a compromise exists it tends to sit between noise and tread life rather than between noise and wet braking, and we will tell you which one you are looking at.
Almost always the pattern. A blockier tread with open shoulders moves more air and is louder from new, then gets louder still as it wears and the block edges sharpen up. If the noise arrived suddenly with no change of tyre, that is something else and worth looking at properly.
Easier, usually. A car park bay gives us room to work all the way round the car and nothing is going past. Tell us where it will be standing and roughly when, and the tyres come to it rather than you bringing the car anywhere.
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