Tread design can impact your car in several ways, including road noise, ride quality, and perhaps most importantly, handling and traction. Tread patterns matter the most and influence the overall performance of the vehicle in adverse conditions. If there had been no dirt, snow or wet conditions, on the roads, tires would be without treads.
Symmetrical Tire Tread Patterns
Symmetrical tire pattern is the most common tire pattern today. They have a repetitive pattern on both the halves of the tires. A good advantage of a symmetrical tire pattern is that they can be used at all the wheel positions in the vehicle. As long as the sizes of the wheels on the front and rear of the vehicles are identical they can be rotated around.
Asymmetrical Tire Tread Patterns
Asymmetrical tire patterns are designed in order to fit both dry and wet conditions of the road. The outsides of the tires will be hard in order to facilitate good turning and the insides will have wet weather driving features such as patterns to displace water. The tire walls are designated either as ‘inside’ or ‘outside’. This is to ensure that the right portion of the tread is in the right position. They can also be used at any position on the vehicle given that, they are installed with the right pattern facing the right direction.
Directional Tire Tread Patterns
Directional tire tread patterns have ‘V’ shaped blocks pointing towards the direction of rotation. These blocks are the best among the patterns to eject water. The ‘V’ block effectively deviates the water away from the path of the tire, and sipings channel them off the tire. On water, no other pattern performs as good as a ‘V’ pattern. However, there is a disadvantage while rotating tires in this pattern. They can only be rotated among the front and rear wheels of different axles. But when that is done, the tires have to be removed from the wheels and refitted, which is expensive.
Directional and asymmetrical tire tread patterns
The Directional and asymmetrical tire patterns combine both water displacement and good performance in dry conditions. For this, The ‘V’ blocks are present in the center, but patterns surrounding the center line are asymmetrical. These tires are also designed to be rotated between the same side. But in cars, even this is not possible because of differing tire sizes.
