As you know, tyre tread depth can have a real impact to the overall handling of your car, along with your safety on the roads. We know that sometimes it can be a little overwhelming when knowing what to look for when checking your tyres so we’ve made a small video to show you how to check your tread depth!

You can view the video here…let us know what you think!

TyreQuote.com How to check your tyre tread depth

Goodyear have revealed their new Air maintenance Technology (AMT), which has been under development for the last two years. It boasts the potential to self-inflate which will mean no more having to check tyre pressure. It has the potential to revolutionise the worlds roads.

The AMT system requires no external pump, electronics or even better…driver intervention. Goodyear acknowledge that the technology is still in very early stages and not currently ready for commercial launch. It is however being supported by grants provided by the US and Luxembourg governments.

“Consumers often overlook the importance of maintaining proper tyre pressure,” Jean-Claude Kihn, Goodyear senior vice-president and chief technical officer, said.

“We believe this technology will enhance safe driving and performance; and have a positive impact on the environment through improved fuel efficiency, reduced emissions and extended tire life.

“The progress we have made is very encouraging and we are now ready to demonstrate it in Geneva for the first time.

Goodyear Tyre

The new AMT technology, the self-inflating tyre system which can also help reduce fuel consumption, was also welcomed by Jean Pierre Jeusette, general director Goodyear Innovation Centre Luxembourg.

“Goodyear Dunlop has always been proactive in research and development,” he said, “and we are looking forward to displaying a range of innovations that people will never have seen before.

“These technologies have been specifically developed to meet the ever-changing requirements of modern consumers and society focused on safety, performance, sustainability, the environment and convenience.”

With the potential to change driving as we know it, its certainly something we will be keeping an eye on for future progress.

We are getting there… slowly…

Whilst blogging away about things we are passionate about hasn’t caused too much concern, understanding how to get the best out of 140 characters on Twitter hasn’t been such a smooth ride. Do we direct message, re-tweet, tweet, follow, reply # tag or @ tag?!

It’s a fascinating and sometimes quite perplexing platform. It’s all too easy to get lost down avenues of links and profiles and hash tags but it’s also quite exciting to find such a rich vein of interesting businesses and individuals just trying to make some new contacts.

Anyway, if you too are a Twitter novice or Tweet Pro, please come and follow us at @tyrequote: http://twitter.com/tyrequote – we’d love to hear from you!

Free MOT for one lucky customer that ‘likes’ our Facebook page

After posting my last blog post, I thought wouldn’t it be great if we could give something back to the lovely people that come on to our Facebook page and leave some feedback on our service, our advert and just what we are trying to do in general. So I spoke to John Fox and he said let’s give them a free MOT when they need one. Thanks John!

So get liking and posting and fingers crossed it’s you that gets picked out. Always nice to save a few quid.

We also have some more juicy offers to put to you soon, so keep an eye out on Facebook and on our blog.

James

Today I just wanted to bring up the topic of Wheel Balancing. Not a fascinating coffee time topic for most people but if you have ever been driving along the motorway with your family in the car and it has developed a terrible ‘wobble’, then it’s something you should be aware of at least.

Tyres are generally speaking made in 2 sections, carefully moulded together to make a complete and even hoop or circle. Unfortunately not all manufacturing processes are entirely perfect and this can create a very slightly imbalance of weight on one side or the other. This is very rare because the tyre manufacturers spend millions on quality control to make sure that the tyres that arrive on your vehicle are as close to perfectly round and balanced as they can. What is much less rare is imperfections in our driving or our driving environment. Yes, even you Jenson Button can stray a little close to the kerb or over that pothole you didn’t see in the dark or under the puddle. Us drivers in the UK are also permenantly hurdling ever increasing speed mountains to keep us at 20mph or less in our suburbs and cities. So with all this careering around our tyres and wheels inevitably take a few knocks and bruises. The strong construction of tyres absorbs most little accidents but after a while they can create minor imbalances of weight across the tyre.

So what you ask? Well at 20-30mph so what indeed but at 60-70mph even a very minor imbalance can lead to quite a vicious ‘wobble’, ‘crabbing’ or ‘juddering’. Your car may vibrate, the steering wheel will shake and it can become quite a noisy and uncomfortable ride for you and your passengers. If you have a heavy car, a 4×4 perhaps, then the effects of a tyre imbalance can be masked by the weight of the car pushing the tyres on to the road, but the effects are still there and your fuel consumption will seriously suffer and other defects could become apparent. You could develop some movement in the suspension system, trouble with your brakes any number of issues.

The crazy thing is that all this can be put right by a very simple and relatively inexpensive procedure – Wheel Balancing. For £20 – £40 you could have all 4 wheels professionally balanced. The garage will remove your tyres, put them on a digital machine that spins the tyre and measures the imbalance and the technician will then apply a small weight to counter the imbalance. Your tyres will then be rolling straight and true again.

When a tyre fitter fits new tyres to your vehicle, they should always check the wheel balancing there and then. We ensure that all tyre quotes from tyrequote.com include wheel balancing as standard, so there are no added extras when you get to the fitting centre.

Just remember, that it’s worth calling in to your fitting centre to check your wheel balancing from time to time – not just when you get new tyres. Some drivers may go a long time between new sets of tyres and some may clip a few kerbs more than others, so save yourself some money and trouble – get your wheel balancing checked and get rid of that wobble!

If only other ‘wobbles’ could be removed for £20-£40!

James

Well, what a race? The cool summer’s day in Germany gave us a fantastic Grand Prix at the infamous Nurburgring yesterday. British driver Lewis Hamilton went a long way to showing his recent critics precisely why he has every right to continue driving with aggressive passion that was just too much for his competitors.

Hamilton squeezed every ounce of power and pace out of his McLaren and he fought admirably to take and re-take leadership of the race several times. A fantastic qualifying lap shoved Vettel off the front row for the first time in months and Lewis took his chance to beat Webber’s sluggish start into the first corner. The racing to follow from Hamilton, Webber and Alonso was edge of the seat stuff and Hamilton came out well ahead of the other podium finishers thanks to some superb overtaking at critical moments in the race.

Sebastian Vettel had a terrible weekend, but somehow he still claimed valuable points with a fourth place finish thanks to a pedestrian tyre stop on the final lap by Philipe Massa in the scarlet Ferrari. Lucky for the German driver who was slow and even spun midway through the race to lose valuable time on the impressive front three.

It seems that RedBull’s early season dominance is coming to an end. McLaren and Ferrari are fighting back, no doubt about it, but is it all a little too late with only 9 races left in the F1 season? I for one, can’t wait to see what transpires over the next handful of races..

Well done Lewis and what a shame that Jenson Button didn’t get a chance to complete what could have been another thrilling finish.

James

I was sat in the office today trying to find some great tyre quotes for a customer who was asking for some good tyres. When I asked what was important to them or if they had any preference in brand or model, the response was vague and they didn’t know what brand was on their car at the time.

So where do we start to help this customer – what does make a ‘good’ tyre?

GRIP

A fair place to start. We want our tyres to grip. We don’t want to be going round a corner or roundabout, turning the steering wheel only to watch in horror as the car slides off the road. When we accelerate or brake, the car should speed up and slow down, not just spin and skid about like a puppy on a frozen pond. Grip is important in all conditions too. We want our tyres to grip in the cold and the wet as much as we do in the warm and dry.

The rainy UK provides quite a challenge, especially with the frequency of ‘flash flooding’ these days. Great lakes of water suddenly appearing on hard dry ground with nowhere for it to drain – our tyres need to be designed to cut through this surface water to find grip on the surface below instead of ski or ‘aqua-plane’ across the top of the water.

WEAR

Although we want lots of grip from our tyres, we don’t want this at the cost of poor tyre wear. If a tyre is made of soft, sticky rubber it might provide lots of grip on tarmac but equally the soft rubber will wear down very quickly and we’ll be needing to replace them all too soon.

This is why we see the different tyres in Formula One. Soft tyres for super fast laps but not too many of them on tracks that cut into the soft tyres and wear them down. Hard tyres for lots of laps without pitstops but not quite as grippy for super fast cornering..

At TyreQuote.com we definitely notice that customers using cheaper tyres are coming back more quickly to replace them than those buying more expensive branded tyres that last a bit longer, with lower levels of tyre wear.

NOISE

Whilst some drivers and motorists seem to favour lots of noise judging by their mammoth fuel guzzling engines and monsterous exhaust pipes, there are others that like to enjoy a quieter ride. With electric and hybrid cars becoming more common and manufacturers working hard to keep the sound from their engines under the bonnet we are more and more finding general motoring a nice and quiet ride. If you have comfy air suspension to waft you over the bumps and lumps in the road then you can enjoy whispered conversation with your passengers even at 60mph.

However, believe it or not, this can be ruined by poorly designed or even just badly fitted tyres.

We’ve already decided we want tyres that grip and tyres that dont wear too quickly but if the pattern on the tyre is so harsh so as to give us grip, it could become incredibly noisy when it rolls and rattles along the rode. if the rubber is very hard and we have a very ‘low profile’ (not much rubber between our wheel and the road) tyre then equally we could be having a noisy journey again.

Compromise

So ideally we want a relatively smooth pattern on the tyre to keep it as round as possible and the lack of noise will also mean better aero dynamics, less drag and increased fuel efficiency. Perfect. Well almost – except as we reduce the pattern and hardness of the rubber, we lose our grip and tyre wear! D’oh!

So it’s not easy to find the perfect tyre. Like many things in life, it’s all about compromise. More grip, more tyre wear. Less grip, less tyre wear. More grip, more noise.. and it goes on.

It really comes down to what sort of driving do you so. If you have a 4×4 and actually go off road more than up on to the school curb then you will want more grip and probably wont mind the extra noise as you are merrily chewing up hills. If you potter around town at 30mph most of the time, then who needs lots of grip? Just find something hard wearing and with low noise and fuel efficient.

Do you live in the Scottish highlands or Yorkshire moors and have early starts up your steep cobbled drive? Okay, a little specific here but seriously think about winter tyres for the winter – you will get even more grip, especially on the snow and ice. You might be better off with a 4 wheel drive car than a rear wheel drive car too then you can benefit from the grip of all 4 tyres, not just the 2 spinning away at the back!

When you are looking for great quotes for tyres on TyreQuote.com make sure you look at our reviews of the tyres you think you want. Do they have the right levels of grip, tyre wear, noise and fuel efficiency for your driving?

Thanks for reading,

James

A rather unsavoury report today, one that really highlights the importance of buying the right tyres and checking your tyres are always fit to drive.

The High Court is currently holding a case involving passengers of a Mitsubishi Pajero jeep that are suing Toyo for damages after their friend was killed when the jeep suffered a blow out and flipped multiple times down the M4 in Wales. A terrible and tragic incident that occured back in 2006. What is under question is whether or not it was a defect in the manufacture of the tyre that caused the incident or if some other factors contributed to the tyre tread actually coming away from nearly half of the body of the tyre.

We always recommend regular checking of your tyres, in particular to ensure that there’s plenty of tread to give you grip, especially in the wet and cold weather, but how can anyone check that their tread isn’t going to detach itself? This is of course an extremely rare case and hope this would never happen again but if you ever see anything untoward with your tyres or feel your vehicle riding in an abnormal way – perhaps pulling to one side or the other or with unusual noises, bumps or delivering a wobble or feedback into the steering wheel, you really must contact your nearest tyre fitter immediately to assess you tyre. Tyre checks are usually very quick and free and can provide you with peace of mind that you are safe to continue driving. If you’re unsure of your nearest tyre fitting centre, then email us at help@tyrequote.com with your postcode and we can recommend someone for you.  Getting a tyre check doesn’t mean you have to buy new tyres, but if the fitter recommends that you do buy new tyres, please come back and see if we can get you some fantastic quotes to make you safe again.

The case continues at the High Court next week.

James

Today’s Hot Topic from TyreQuote.com is ‘Tyre Labelling’.

Sounds fascinating, doesn’t it?! Well to us, it could be. Let me explain…

In November 2012 another bit of European red tape will hit our shores and this time the impact will be on tyre retailers. The lovely people in Brussels have decided that all tyres should come with a label that allows consumers to easily compare 3 criteria – Fuel Efficiency, Wet Grip and Exterior Noise.

The labels will look much like the sort of thing you see on fridge freezers with coloured bands that range from a greeen ‘A’ to a rosy red ‘G’ with A being the best and G being the worst. We assume that low noise is good and higher noise is bad – contrary to what many motor enthusiasts believe to be true of their exhaust or engine notes!

So far there’s not much noise from the major tyre retailers about the forthcoming tyre labels, it will certainly cost them to ensure that all the right labels are displayed in the right places but in our view the concept is a good thing. At TyreQuote we already grade almost all of our tyres for Dry Grip, Wet Grip, Tyre Wear and Comfort. We then compile these measurements for an overall grading to help you purchase the right tyres for your motoring needs. We shall certainly be looking to add Fuel Efficiency and Noise to those gradings as soon as we can tease the data from the manufacturers.

We know that picking the right tyre can be a confusing task, especially if you do few miles each year and care little for the mechanics of the rubber wrapped round your wheels. The average punter is very much in the hands of the salesman/mechanic in their local fitting centre and we’re not saying that is a bad thing, but having clear and concise labels on each tyre has got to be an improvement on just the bewildering impressions of letters and digits we find on tyre sidewalls these days.

TyreQuote.com say yes to EU Tyre Labelling and look forward to displaying them on our site as soon as we can get the relevant data from the manufacturers.

James

At TyreQuote.com we can’t help but get a little bit excited about watching a Grand Prix or two. We like tyres and we like racing – shame then that this weekend’s European Grand Prix didn’t exactly hit the high notes of the previous round in Montreal when Britain’s Jenson Button finally exploited a chink in the otherwise unflappable armour of Seb Vettel.

With the Canadian rain a distant memory on the sun baked Valencia street track, there was simply a sad lack of action at the business end of things. A tidy overtaking from Alonso on Webber was really the only glimmer of the elite talent that we hope to witness each time we tune into the excellent BBC coverage. Perhaps it’s just sour grapes that the McLarens of Hamilton and Button simply didn’t have the pace to challenge and with only a couple of short week’s until the British GrandPrix, it will have to be rain dances around Silverstone to mitigate against another domination from Red Bull and the infuriating finger wagging Vettel.

So while we pray for some more technological genius to pour out of the McLaren headquarters in Surrey to prompt a championship challenge at last we can briefly reflect on our other passion – tyres. This weekend’s Valencia Grand Prix saw the introduction of Pirelli’s medium compound PZero tyre in an effort to withstand the harsh and hot track surface.  During the build up to the race it seemed that as usual the different teams had different opinions on the Pirelli tyres and McLaren themselves seemed to be complaining that the medium compound wasn’t really giving them enough grip compared to the softer option tyres and getting enough heat into the medium and hard tyres over the course of the season so far was proving tricky. Ferrari have also been reported to voice disappointment in the Pirelli tyres with Fernando Alonso getting most upset at the recent Spanish Grand Prix when he was even lapped by the front runners because he couldn’t get any grip or pace from the harder tyres offered by Pirelli. Many of the drivers stopped 4 times that race, so the evidence was that the tyre strategy wasn’t quite right.

At TyreQuote.com we think Pirelli have done a good job returning to Formula 1 so far this season and hopefully we can see a return to more spectacular racing soon. Good to luck to Lewis and Jenson at Silverstone!

If you are looking to purchase Pirelli tyres for your own car, try our brilliant and innovative Tyre Quote service, finding you the best prices from all your local tyre fitters.