You may have put your winter tires on, but if they aren’t properly inflated, they aren’t as effective.
Across the United States and Canada, a growing number of insurance companies are offering discounts for careful attention to safety throughout winter months, such as using winter tires, but drivers should also be investing in a high quality digital tire pressure gauge to make sure their inflation is where it should be.
Fluctuating temperatures make it especially important to keep an eye on tire inflation levels.
On the Canadian side of the border, drivers across the province of Ontario will soon be receiving a discount from their auto insurance companies when they install winter tires on their vehicles. This discount is being mandated to begin when they start a new policy or renew an existing one and will become effective as of January 1, 2016. This situation is hardly unique to that Canadian province as insurance providers use this safety feature to offer attractive discounts that will appeal to drivers in colder parts of the United States. That said, a tire pressure gauge should be considered just as important as the new set of snows.
A good tire pressure gauge makes it possible for drivers to track their inflation throughout the season.
It doesn’t take much of a change in temperature outside to alter the inflation of a vehicle’s tires. Even a couple of pounds can have a measurable impact on fuel mileage and on the ability to control the vehicle itself. While this difference may not sound like much, when the roads are already a mess and every inch counts in terms of keeping a vehicle safely on the road while avoiding collisions with other road users and obstacles, tire pressure becomes considerably more important.
Therefore, while drivers are receiving recommendations to use winter tires in order to improve the safety of their vehicles on the road throughout the rougher snowy and icy weather, and while an insurance discount may be an even greater incentive to get out and do it, it’s also important to maintain them throughout the season by checking their inflation.
A digital tire pressure gauge helps a driver to know that the winter tires are going to perform according to their design, that it they will help to keep everyone in the car safe, that fuel mileage will be kept to a minimum, that the tires will last longer and that there will be a lower risk of ever having to make an insurance claim.