What are the colored stripes on tires for?

What are the colored stripes on tires for?

Автор: Mosautoshina

A lot of information is circulating on the web about which tires to choose, and perhaps the most fantastic tips are concentrated around the color coding of the tread. These are the same color stripes on the tread that you've probably encountered when choosing new tires. These stripes do not indicate the quality of the tires or their characteristics, so they are absolutely useless for the buyer, unless they can confirm that the tire has not been used, but in general, this is already clear from the tread.

This information will also be useless for a tire fitter, and perhaps it will only be useful for a warehouse worker, because when storing tires, the marking on the sidewall is often inaccessible and the stripes on the tread can navigate by the size of the tire at a certain period.


The question of why they are applied by the manufacturer can be easily answered by visiting a tire factory. The plant can simultaneously produce tires of different lines, models, and sizes. At the same time, the tread tape has no distinctive features until the pattern is formed in the mold. How to prevent summer tires from getting a rubber mixture of winter tires and vice versa? That's right. By applying distinctive marks during the formation of the tread rubber compound. At the same time, this can be both letter designation and color coding. As can be seen in this photo, it is during the formation of the tread rubber that the color coding is applied.