Buying New Tyres for Your Car

When you’re spinning out of control on an icy patch of road, it’s too late to think about buying tyres for your car. Now’s the time, before the first winter storm, to get those new treads. In the process, you want to keep your finances under control as well. So follow these tips when you are making a search for tyres and improve your chances for finding the highest quality tyres at the best price:

Buy the Appropriate Tyre for Your Vehicle

Do you drive a sedan, an SUV, a truck or a zippy sports car? What you drive affects what kind of tyres you’ll need. What type of road conditions do you drive in? Wet, snowy or icy? Mountainous or flat? Read More

Buying New Tyres for Your BMW X5

The BMW X5 is seen as an SUV with great performance and low running costs. Solidly built with all the safety features you’d expect from a BMW, the X5 comes in several different models. When buying new tyres, you need to be sure that you’re choosing the right ones for your specific X5.

Run-flat Tyres

One of the safety innovations that comes with the BMW X5 is a new kind of tyre technology. Run-flat tyres allow you to carry on driving even after you get a puncture. The specially reinforced sides protect your wheels from damage for a significant distance – giving you plenty of opportunity to get the punctured tyre repaired. Run-flat tyres mean an end to dangerous roadside tyre changes. They also obviate the need to carry a spare in the boot of your BMW, cutting down on weight and leaving you with more space for luggage.

While its possible to replace your run-flat tyres with standard tyres, its not really advisable. Run-flat tyres increase your cars safety, are more convenient and allow you to run your car more efficiently. Replacing just one or two out of four tyres with a non-flat-run tyre could also make your car much less safe to drive.

BMW X5 tyres

Tyre Load Rating

Any replacement tyre must have the same tyre load rating as the previous tyre. Like all cars made since 1973, your BMW X5 will have a tyre placard fitted that tells you the load rating you need to buy.

In some cases, a tyre offered as less expensive may prove to have a lower load rating than the one that you need. You need to check that the tyre you’re being sold has a sufficiently high rating. Purchasing a tyre that has the wrong load rating can be very dangerous. It makes your car less safe and may invalidate your insurance, leaving you uninsured in the event of an accident.

Tyre Matching

As well as ensuring that your tyres have the correct load rating, tyres need to be properly matched. If one or two of your tyres are significantly different to the others, this can compromise your vehicles safety. Matching tyres correctly is particularly important if your vehicle is one of the permanent four-wheel drive models. Read More

Why is it important to have proper tyre pressure?

If the tyre pressure is not proper, you have to shell out more money for maintaining your car. This is because unless the tyre is properly inflated, more energy is required to run the vehicle. Not only that, if you want to pick up speed, you again spend more energy for it. So, more energy consumption means that your car is giving out more harmful gases, which will not only affect us adversely but also the environment. So, make your bit of contribution to the environment by keeping your tyre pressure optimum at all times. Let us see what the other consequences are if you do not have your car tyres inflated properly.

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Appropriate tyre pressure gives better mileage

If your car tyres are not inflated to the optimum or rather to its full capacity, you fail to get proper mileage. Study conducted at the Carnegie Mellon University indicates that the mileage can improve by as much as 3.3% with proper inflated tyres.

It is also important to check the pressure in tyres frequently; at least once a month would suffice. Till the time you are using the original tyres, you don’t have to worry about the pressure at the time of buying the vehicle. This is because the original tyre pressure details are usually mentioned in the user manual so you can be sure about the same. But the trouble starts when you are using a replacement tyre. In this case the PSI or the Pound Per Square Inch rating may be different. So, you might have to double check with the replacement tyre manufacturer.

When the weather is cold, the internal pressure of the tyres increases if it has been running on the road for quite some time. However, the pressure is restored when the car stops. So, it is important to check the pressure of tyres when the temperature drops on a particular day.

Tyre pressure monitoring system

These days you will find that most of the tyre manufacturers are required to install tyre pressure monitoring system. In this there are tiny sensors that are attached to the wheels. The moment the pressure on the tyres drop by more than 25% of the standard PSI, the sensor will send signals. So, after the introduction of this system, the consumers will have to shell out a little more for the maintenance of their vehicles.

It has also been established that if the tyre pressure is good, the incidence of accidents is also minimized considerably.