It’s the beginning of winter here in New York, which means it’s time to make sure your car is ready for winter weather driving. This means checking everything over, making sure your wipers are in good shape, but probably most importantly, making sure your tires are good.

I recently had a customer come in to get their snow tires put on. If you can afford them, a set of snow tires is always the best choice for winter driving. While looking over the car, I checked the tread on their all-season tires and found that they were all at 4/32nds. If they were planning on running all-season tires instead of snow tires, I would’ve recommended a new set, because much lower than this wouldn’t perform very well. The legal limit in many states is 2/32nds.

Before installing their snow tires I checked their tread to see how they were doing, and found a problem. All of their snow tires were 3 or 4/32nds. For all-season tires in the summer, this would be fine, but 4/32nd is where I would call for new snow tires. Instead of buying two new sets of tires, this customer decided to just get a new set of all-season tires. While still not the best design for winter driving, brand new all-season tires should do well in the snow.

Don’t ignore your tires like I did and then wonder why you were fishtailing all winter. I used these tires up pretty well.

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-Dan