Wake up folks, tires aren’t round at all – tires are flat. Or well, yes, a little. A tiny bit, even. And that is why there is a red dot on the side of many new car tires. The yellow and red dots on car tires are aids when mounting tires on rims.
If you mount a new car tire on a rim, you have to balance the wheel (this is the combination of rim and tire). It is preferable to use as little balancing weight as possible for this. That saves a little money, but it also reduces the chance of imbalance if a piece of lead comes loose.
What do those red and yellow dots on car tires mean?
Even a brand new car tire isn’t quite perfectly round. Many tire manufacturers already measure the highest point of the tire at the factory and place a red dot on the exact opposite side. The valve cap is often the heaviest point of the rim, so you mount it at the red dot. By putting the highest point of the tire and the cap opposite each other, you already balance the wheel a bit.
A yellow dot sits opposite the heaviest point of the tire. The tire manufacturer also weighs this in advance. By placing the valve cap at the dot here too, you balance the wheel as far as possible before you start working with lead. If a tire has both a yellow and a red dot, you usually choose the red dot.
Sometimes rims themselves also have an indication where they are heaviest. This can be a sticker, for example. In this case you do not take the valve cap, but the indicator as a point to match the dot with. That could have been the case with the red dot rim above. Or would the owner have placed the valve cap exactly between the two dots?
My tires have no dots
The yellow and red dots on car tires are also fairly easy to brush off. It is therefore possible that your car does not have dots on the tires, because these have already been removed in the factory or in the garage.
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