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-   -   Does speed affect tyre wear? (https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/technical-stuff/104674-does-speed-affect-tyre-wear.html)

If you drive a set of tyres 30K kms on mainly highway at high speeds, versus same car, same tyres for 30k kms in slow speed city traffic, which would show more wear of tread?

It would depend on the road condition and the load on the car. And if you get wheel alignment/balancing done regularly.

With everything kept as constant, the tyres that run on highways will wear out faster. As the speed increases the wear out increases as well.

All else remaining the same, the city tyre will have more tread left. Be warned though, that the city has the element of surprise with concealed potholes & potential sidewall hits. Your wheels lose alignment faster in the city. A heavily off- alignment car can shred its tyres in as low as 1K kms.

BTW, why are you asking about tread left at 30K, the tyre is close to end of life at that point anyway.

Just a random figure. What I wanted to know was, what wears out tyres faster. Is 30K kms really the end of a tyres life? I remember driving an older car of mine for more than 50K kms and it had tread still. Current car is about 22K.

Thanks for the info guys.

If you take care of alignment , balancing , rotation regularly (around 5k) and don't test your brakes very often in the city then you should be able to stretch it to 50k kms!!

City drives wear out tyres much faster. Reason: Sliding friction is more than roilling friction.

Whist city drive, you make much more steering maneuvers, in low speeds. Moreover, acceleration and braking frequency is more in city drives, which further increases sliding friction, and hence tyre wear. We have reports of tyres that have covered 80k kms on the higway, running steady speeds.

NO.

Tyre life depends on thread depth and tyre age. Thread depth, you can see, and as for age, you need to replace tyres once in 5-6 years, irrespective of thread kms run, as the rubber will have hardened.

My Maruti 800's original tyres, MRF Zigma C, lasted 90,000kms.
After that , they started to give way, one after the other.
The car was driven for abt 70,000kms mostly in a small town, Moradabad(UP) by the first owner.Then I drove it in Delhi only for the next 20,000kms till the original tyres gave out.
If tyre pressure/balancing/alignment etc are kept in order,then I guess driving style also makes a significant difference to the tyre life-hard acceleration/slamming on brakes/hard cornering are also a factor re tyre life.
My 2 cents...

A habit of using pedal and brake to a minimum (anticipate traffic, take your foot off the pedal if you anticipate a brake further down + don't accelerate hard in general) will improve both tyre life and FE. The reason is sliding friction and actual sliding that invariably happens during both acceleration and braking.

A highway drive done at mostly constant speed with very little hard acceleration and braking will invariably keep the tyre temperature low and the tyre damage minimal.

A city drive with a driver who believes city roads are racetracks will wear tyres out much faster than the highway driving style mentioned above.


That said there are more factors - in the hands of any given driver highway drives will usually result in faster tyre damage - this is because the driver will do pedal-brake to the same extent on our highways (and at much higher speeds) and in any case rolling friction guarantees that on highways tyre will be running much higher temperatures - higher temperatures lead to accelerated damage.

Keeping all variables aside, just a simple answer to your simple question, "YES", tires will wear out faster on highway runs because the speeds are higher which directly co-relate to traction! The car will grip more at higher speeds & thus increasing traction inturn increasing wear & tear. Simple!!

yeah, i know this from experience. 2k km is all it took to make my 800's tyres totally bald. But then besides bad wheel alignment , the master cylinders on my rear brakes were totally jammed therefore reulting in greater tyre wear for my front sets . i didnt realise that the rear brakes werent working cuz the braking distance didnt increase appreciably since all the weight got transferred to the front and increased grip and wear. the only sign was slightly unstable braking.

What has speed got to do with life. Ask a formula one driver, he will better explain.

However, every tyre has speed and temperature rating and if driven in limits both tyres should last the same. Tyres have operating temperatures that our city car only gather due to Summer heat. Normal consumer tyres are hard compound thus nothing much Shiism separate the running mileage. Over to the tyre gurus. Cheers!

The faster you go, the harder your tyre has to work. Think of it this way : Say, there's a 15 km ghat section. One set of tyres are driven down the ghat at 40 kph, the other at a 100 kph. Which one do you think will wear out the tyres more?

Never judge the available grip by the tread alone. My OHC Vtec's super-hard Bridgestone S322s still have a decent amount of tread left in them. However, the grip (and grippier rubber) were completely gone. Plus, tyres do harden & wear out with time as well. Ideally, you'd change tyres every 40,000 kms tops.

But GTO if the highway is straight and the car driven in limit say in range of 60 to 80 km/h then what do you reckon? Yes braking and acceleration will have it's wear and tear effect.

Even on a straight highway tyre will operate at a higher temperature than it does in cities in stop and go traffic.

This is because rolling resistance is practically constant (irrespective of speed) within the range of tyre's allowed speeds (go well beyond you encounter in normal driving) so the heat generated in the tyre is the same, irrespective of speed, for the same distance travelled.

On the other hand since at higher speeds you spend less time to cover the same distance, you generate the same amount of heat in lesser time - ergo the thermal power generation is faster.

The thermal power dissipation still happens via tyre surfaces and the rate increases only slightly - hence increase in tyre temperature on highways.


And higher temperature inadvarently means softer rubber (hence faster wear) and ALSO higher rolling resistance resistance (hysteresis curve becomes wider).


By the way, even on a perfectly flat surface (there is no such thing in practice - even if the surface were flat to begin with, the fact that tyre puts a load is going to deform the surface - this is one reason asphalt roads provide better grip than concrete roads) both the leading and lagging edges of the tyre's contact patch are actually sliding a little against the road. Also no matter what you, while you can minimize the scrubbing of tyres (by perfect alignment of castor cambor and toe) in reality some will always remain - within engineering tolerances.

So there is always some (very miniscule) sliding going on even if you are not into an outright skid.



Another culprit is turns - All turns cause tyres to slide against the road surface a little. Understeer/Oversteer cause way more of this. On most highway runs people do not encounter that many turns - on most city drives thee are plenty of turns. BUT in city the turns are negotiated at a slow pace - very little understeer/oversteer in ever observed. On highways most cars are designed to understeer a little - and this happens at high speeds too. So on a twisty highway you are losing the tyre faster than on your city roads.