What are tapered blocks for?

Can a new tire be inferior to a used tire in terms of characteristics?

Strangely enough, this can be the case, especially when it comes to summer tires.

The thing is that new summer tires have two key tasks - to provide reliable traction and handling on dry pavement and to effectively overcome flooded road sections.

With water, everything is clear. Here, the pattern and how effectively water is drained through the longitudinal channels are of great importance. But what about dry pavement? It's important to have the maximum amount of tread rubber in the contact patch. A new tire has sharp edges of the tread pattern blocks, and when braking, the combined share of rubber is not so high until the blocks are rounded and provide better traction.

Of course, the share of this improvement is not so critical and in some cases may not be noticeable at all. But nevertheless, manufacturers consider it important to equip the tire with maximum traction from the first kilometers and start "trimming" the blocks of new tires. This is especially noticeable in sports models and premium brands.