Tread Carefully – worn tyres could put you in danger
Worn tyres can be deadly: according to industry body TyreSafe , nearly a thousand car accidents a year in the UK are caused by illegal, defective or under-inflated tyres. And while, by law, the minimum tread depth is 1.6mm, it’s all too common to see tyres well below this level – despite the risk to the driver and other road users. When we go to fit new tyres, we measure the tread on all of the tyres on our customers’ vehicles, which gives us plenty of information on the state of the nation’s wheels. Using data from over 213,000 tyre measurements by TyresOnTheDrive professionals, we decided to find out where the country’s worst culprits for illegal tyres can be found. This heatmap shows the postcodes with the greatest concentrations of tyres below 1.6mm in red. Newport, Swansea and Hereford were the biggest offenders, with 19.8%, 19.7% and 17.8%, respectively, of the tyres examined by our staff falling below the legal minimum. In fact, Wales and the West of England seem...