How Low Profile Tires Can Hurt Your Car

Wheels with low profile tires look beautiful on any car, so many car owners are in a hurry to put them on their "iron horse". But few people know that such "decorations" can be very expensive for the driver. The AvtoVzglyad portal tells about what to be afraid of.

The first thing that suffers the most when installing low profile tires is the smoothness of the machine. And the chances of damaging the wheel on a bad road also increase, because the smaller the profile of the tire, the less its ability to resist shock loads.

It's also easy to damage the disc. Well, if only its geometry is broken, and if the impact is strong, the disk will simply crack. If this happens at speed, then such a car will be difficult to stabilize. As a result, the pursuit of beautiful wheels will lead to a severe accident.

One more nuance. If you have installed low-profile tires, you need to constantly monitor the pressure, because it is visually impossible to understand that it is below normal. This is because the sidewall of such a tire is made less elastic than a high profile wheel. And the difference in pressure not only increases fuel consumption, but also contributes to the fact that the tire does not hold a blow well. From here, as we wrote above, the risk of damage to the wheel increases.

"Insulating tape" on the disks does not add durability and running gear. Hard impacts that such tires are not able to soften reduce the life of shock absorbers, silent blocks and ball bearings. Let's not forget that wheels for low-profile tires are heavier than those designed to install conventional "rubber".

For example, if you “change shoes” on a Volkswagen Tiguan from seventeenth to nineteenth wheels, this will increase the unsprung weight by almost 25 kg in total. Such an “appendage” will reduce the life of suspension parts, especially rubber bushings and silent blocks, which at some point can simply turn around.

And if the wheels are not only low profile, but also protrude from the arches, they heavily load the wheel bearings and it becomes difficult to drive such a car. Especially when the wheel hits a bump in the road or a pothole. Then the steering wheel literally breaks out of your hands, and the bearings become consumables.