More than one in three drivers doesn’t know when their tires are bald

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The most important safety feature on your car isn't its airbag or even the seat belts-it's the tires. This should be obvious; those four round black things are the only part of the vehicle to actually touch the road, after all. Sadly, most American drivers fail to take care of their tires, with 35 percent of drivers not able to tell if their tires are bald. When you consider that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that vehicles with worn out tires were three times more likely to end up in a crash, you can see the problem.

That data is from a 2015 survey conducted by the US Tire Manufacturers Association (USTMA), which held its annual National Tire Safety Week in May. "[The Tire Safety Week] was born as a way to allow us to talk about tire safety to consumers," Kimberly Kleine, USTMA's vice president of public affairs, told me recently. The trade group has been running the program since 2001 to promote consumer awareness about checking tire pressure, suspension alignment, and tread depth, as well as the need to rotate tires.

When we spoke, Kleine and her colleague Tracey Norberg, senior VP and general counsel at USTMA, shared some other scary statistics. In addition to so few people knowing when their tires are out, 40 percent think they can tell if a tire is under-inflated just by looking at it. And just 17 percent knew how to check their tire pressures. You'd think that in the age of government-mandated tire pressure monitoring systems (TPMS), this would be a thing of the past. Not so. "Even if a car has TPMS, the warning light will only go on once a tire is 25 percent below its recommended pressure," Norberg explained.

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