A penny for your thoughts?
Seems that tirerack.com has done some testing on tires and determined that the tread we THOUGHT was safe is only HALF as safe as we thought. Used to be you stick a penny in the tread groove on your car tire with Abe upside down, because the amount of space between his hair and the penny's edge was conveniently the "safe height" of tire tread. If you could see his hair, you were good.
Now these guys (who sell tires, and lots of them) ran a couple of tests with a couple of cars (a bmw and a ford pickup) and conclude that you need to replace them if they won't pass that same test with a quarter. They apparently found that on a soaked road (water flowing over it about as high as a dime's width) you add about 100ft to the stopping distance from the quarter tires to the penny tires.
I conclude that if your tires are thin, don't drive 70mph in the rain.
Now these guys (who sell tires, and lots of them) ran a couple of tests with a couple of cars (a bmw and a ford pickup) and conclude that you need to replace them if they won't pass that same test with a quarter. They apparently found that on a soaked road (water flowing over it about as high as a dime's width) you add about 100ft to the stopping distance from the quarter tires to the penny tires.
I conclude that if your tires are thin, don't drive 70mph in the rain.
Comments