Posted on 13 December 2020
You've probably never paid much attention to the writing on the sides of your tires, but they contain a wealth of information. There's a long combination of letters and numbers that can tell you a whole lot about what tires your vehicle was designed to be riding on. Let's check out this example found on an SUV: P245/70R17 108T. The first letter, P, means it's intended for passenger vehicles. If there's no letter, it means it's a metric tire. If there's an LT at the beginning or end that means a tire designed for light trucks. Moving on to our example, the 245 shows how wide the tire is in millimeters from sidewall to sidewall. The number that follows in our example, 70, means the height of the tire is 70% of its width. The letter after that in our example, R, describes the type of tire (on this vehicle, radial). Following that is the diameter in inches, in our SUV example, 17 inches. How much load the tires' sidewalls are designed to take ... read more