ABSTRACT
Tire tread wear is a key issue in the tire development process and for tire customers. In order to measure the wear performance, tire manufacturers usually proceed to wear tests and calculate the tire life from those tests. An important point in this tire life computation is the criteria chosen for defining the tire's end of life. In Europe, there is a legal minimum tread depth set to 1.6 mm applicable to 75% of the tread pattern width. However, outside those 75% (i.e., on the shoulder part), no clear and shared limit is defined. Also, the usual behavior of customers to decide when their tires should be changed is not well known. The goal of this 2012 study was to identify an average worn profile of tires in Europe and the behavior of customers for replacing their tires. For that, 3000 tires worn out by customers have been collected in scrapyards and measured in five European countries. In this article, we will present the tire collecting method, the measurement process, the analysis method, and some general results and statistics on this 3000 tire database. Finally, the method to compute the average end of life profile and the resulting profile is given.
