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Regardless of whether you get behind the wheel of an old Toyota Corolla everyday, a high-performance supercar on the weekends, or a trusty old Honda motorbike, one consumable that all motorists depend on is tires. Not only do we all depend on them, but we get through them, too. It doesn’t matter if your daily commute sees you cover a thousand miles each week, or if you just zip to the shops every other day, covering 10 or 15 miles here and there. This is because tires need replacing regardless, be it due to wear, failure, or simply age.

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So, it stands to reason that all of us should at least have a basic understanding of what tires we need, and what the secret markings on our tires mean. Alongside numerous letters, numbers, and codes, brand-new tires will show a number of different colored lines of them – but what do they mean?

These stripes form a similar function to the red and yellow dots which appear on new tires, and aren’t really something that motorists need to pay much attention to. Instead, the colorful stripes provide important information to the manufacturer and retailers, usually relating to quality control and tracking.

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Rather than branding the tire with permanent instructions, such as the tire size, manufacturers use these stripes, which will wear off after a few miles of driving. The stripes tell employees at the tire production plant important information which helps to make the manufacturing and distribution process as smooth as possible.

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For example – one tire manufacturer may brand a certain batch of tires with a red stripe, which could indicate every so-branded tire is to be delivered to a certain customer. This stripe acts as a quick and easily-identifiable visual cue for those sorting the tires for distribution.

This code will be unique to that one manufacturer, though, as there is no universal coding system for the colored stripes on tires. One example would be that a red stripe at a separate manufacturer could mean the tire is a certain size, rather than relating to where it needs to go after production.

The stripes are only printed on, and so, after just a few miles of driving, they will wear off. End-users may find this useful, as they can easily identify that the tires fitted to their car are new, and that part-worn tires haven’t been fitted by a garage instead. Given that the meaning of these stripes is purely for the manufacturer, it’s perfectly acceptable, and actually ideal, that they wear off so quickly, as their use is over by this point.

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