Tire Care
If you hear or heard one of those radio ads promoting ''Be Tire Smart'' week and didn't listen closely, you probably thought it was some kind of trick to get you to buy more tires.
Not so. It was instead an effort to save you money, increase your level of safety, and give the environment a break. As for helping to sell more tires, if more people followed the advice in the ads and checked the inflation of their vehicle's tires more often, it would actually decrease the number of tires sold.
The message that Ottawa and the Rubber Association of Canada (RAC) want to get across to drivers is that there are many benefits to be had from maintaining your vehicle's tires, but particularly their air pressure.
If you look after your tires, you can save money on gas, increase your safety levels, use the tires longer, and does less damage to the environment.
It turns out there are a lot of people who could benefit from this advice, since a recent study by the RAC and Ottawa showed that 70 percent of vehicles on the road have at least one tire that is improperly inflated by more than 10 percent.
This means that Canadians are wasting millions and millions of dollars a year on extra gas because they don't bother to check the air pressure in their vehicle's tires on a monthly basis.
The same situation exists in the U.S., where a study by the Rubber Manufacturers Association (RMA) showed that more than three times as many drivers think oil changes are more important to the safe operation of their vehicle than checking the air-pressure is.
Ironically, not only are oil changes not that important to the safe operation of a vehicle, but most people also waste oil and money by paying for too many of them.
The RMA survey also found that North American drivers are more likely to wash their cars than correctly check their tire pressure. Three out of four survey respondents wash their car every month, but only one in seven correctly check the tire pressure.
Donald B. Shea, president and CEO of the RMA, wants to change all that. Indeed, he wants North American motorists ''to become as conscientious about checking tires as they are about using seatbelts.''
Shea and the RMA are hoping that drivers will pay attention to four different aspects of tire maintenance (pressure, alignment, rotation and tread), but with gasoline prices continuing to rise it's probably the most useful to key on the issue of fuel economy.
''Keeping tires properly inflated improves gas mileage and saves money,'' Shea correctly advises, and uses information from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to back the statement up. According to the DOE, drivers can improve their fuel economy by about 3.3 percent by keeping their tires inflated to the proper pressure.