Perhaps you are the kind of motorist who does not travel far and long in winter. Maybe you have kept that vehicle of yours for so many years that you can’t remember when you bought winter tires for it. If you are about to put those same old tires back on the car for the upcoming winter, stop and think about it. Do you really know how old they are? Did you know there is an expiration date for tires?

In most cases, the date the tire was made is cast in the sidewall. Tires made before 2000 will have a 10-digit identification number beginning with DOT and ending with a number like 408, for example. That means the tire was made during the fortieth week of the year and the eighth year of the decade. Since 2000, manufacturers have been using a 12-digit identification number, still beginning with DOT but ending with four-digit number, such as 5107. In this case, the tire was made during the fifty-first week of the year 07 (2007).

According to most manufacturers, most tires have a safe and useful life of about seven years. That is when the rubber starts drying out and begins cracking up. Such tires might not scare you if you do mostly city driving at slower speeds, but