CEAT Tyres has been one of the great innovators in the business since the beginning, and now it has introduced a new technology with its new Milaze X3 range of tyres, the tread wear indicator. This will surely be a crucial addition to any car owner’s safety playbook and allow you to be more vigilant while driving on the road.
Do you know how to check if a tyre is roadworthy or if it has reached the end of its life? If your answer was to look at the depth of the tread, you were right! Tyres are incredibly important to cars. As the only points of contact with the road, they are incredibly important to everything that a car does — from acceleration, braking to cornering. And bald tyres or tyres without enough tread are a safety hazard. You see, tyres wear down over time. As the tread depth reduces, its ability to channel water out from under the tyre reduces and that means there is a higher chance of these tyres losing grip on wet surfaces. When the tread reduces beyond a certain point, it is time to change said tyres.
Usually, tyres have something called a tread wear indicator that tells you when they need a change but these are hard to spot and difficult to read unless you know exactly what you’re looking for. Many people resort to measuring tread depth with a coin and judging how much tread is left. But many just don’t do anything and run bald tyres on their cars, making them hazards on the road. Well, CEAT is changing things by introducing a tyre that lets you know very clearly that it needs to be replaced. This innovation will make it very obvious that a tyre has reached the end of its life, and thus needs replacement, keeping our roads safer.
CEAT has introduced a new technology for some of its tyres, with a coloured tread wear indicator. Instead of looking for tiny indicators on the tyre, as the tyre wears down, it will start to reveal a yellow band underneath the surface of the rubber. Once this colour is visible properly, you know that the tyre has worn down too far and it is time to change it. This worn-out tyre featured in these pictures, for example, has run 90,000km and clearly shows the yellow band.
This is an ingenious way to inform customers that it is time to change their tyres because it's in-your-face. Earlier, an uninformed or lazy customer would be driving around on bald tyres being a hazard on the road to themselves and everyone around them. With something such as this, they really don’t have to examine their tyres to know when it needs a chance.
To see how these tyres work, check out the video on your YouTube channel!
These tyres are available in two sizes to begin with – a 205/65 R15 Milaze X3 and a 205/65 R16 Milaze X3. The former is for the Toyota Innova while the latter is for the Innova Crysta.
We are slapping on a set of these tyres onto our long-term Toyota Innova Crysta. The Crysta is a real mile muncher and should run through these tyres faster than the other cars in our fleet, allowing us to put this ingenious feature from CEAT to the test.
You can also read about the CEAT Tread Wear Indicator tyres in the latest issue of evo India magazine. Get your copy today!