What Do The Red And Yellow Dots On Tires Mean?

While most of the attention on automobiles is focused on the exterior design, engine specifications, and tech features, the tires often get neglected. However, tires have a profound impact on your cars ride, efficiency, performance, and most importantly safety. For this reason you should continually monitor the look of the rubber — if you see tire cords, get them replaced ASAP.

One of the critical elements to how well a tire performs is balance. An unbalanced tire can cause excessive vibration, uneven wear, and it can even sabotage fuel economy. These are just a few of the reasons why proper tire alignment and rotation is so important.

While tires may appear completely uniform, it's simply not feasible to make an unflawed and impeccably balanced tire. The fact is that during the manufacturing process, imperfections are created, including differences in weight and shape throughout. Everything still must be balanced in order to function optimally as stated before, but how?

Yellow dots mark where a tire's weight is the most minimal, and red dots indicate where the wheel is lowest, helping tire technicians properly balance things to account for irregularities. But, before traveling to the installation shop, you should be familiar with the average cost of new tires and how to know if you're being ripped off.

There are two forms of imbalances that tires experience, static and dynamic. A static imbalance occurs when a section of a tire is either heavier or lighter than the rest of it, preventing it from rolling uniformly. This can create a vertical jarring sensation as you travel down the road. A dynamic imbalance describes an issue where either side of the tire (excluding the center) has a disproportionate weight, making the wheel undergo a horizontal wobbling motion.

When you take your vehicle to a tire shop, they will remove each wheel and place it on a specialized machine that spins it and analyzes imbalances. The technician can view all the diagnostic test data on a screen and then systematically add unique weights strategically at certain points on the tire to correct the balance issues. The yellow and red dots come into play as well, helping the technician locate imperfections and line up the dots to counteract the heaviest, lightest, and flattest sections of tire.

There are consumer-tier bubble wheel balancers under $100, however they can't produce the same level of accuracy that professional direct drive wheel balancers offer, which start at just under $5,000. Considering that placing weights mere millimeters off from the ideal location can result in problems, it might be best to leave this task to trained technicians, rather than doing it yourself.