It's a question we get asked a lot by trade and delivery operators around Dundee, Perth and Angus: how often should a fleet actually check its tyres? The honest answer is more often than most drivers' own visual checks catch, and on a schedule that's about proactive replacement, not just staying on the right side of the legal minimum.
The legal minimum isn't the operational target
UK law sets 1.6mm as the minimum tread depth across the central three quarters of the tyre, all the way round. That's the line where a tyre becomes illegal, not the line where it's still performing well. Most fleet-management guidance settles on replacing proactively once tread reaches somewhere around 2 to 3mm, giving a safety margin before wet-weather grip and stopping distance start to suffer. Waiting until 1.6mm to act means the tyre has already been operating in its weakest, riskiest zone for a while before anyone noticed.
A realistic checking rhythm
A sensible cadence for a working fleet looks something like this: a quick driver visual and pressure check before or after a shift, a proper technician-led tread depth and wear-pattern check monthly, and a full professional inspection covering the whole vehicle at least annually. For vans doing high daily mileage, particularly multi-drop delivery work, monthly is closer to right than quarterly. Michelin's own commercial tyre guidance puts rough tread loss at around one millimetre for every 9,000 to 12,000 miles, which is a useful way to sanity check whether a monthly or a longer interval fits a particular fleet's actual mileage.
Why the driver's own check isn't enough on its own
A pre-shift visual check is genuinely useful and worth keeping, but it's not a substitute for a proper inspection. A tyre can look fine from a glance and still be a few weeks from its replacement threshold, or carrying sidewall damage from a kerb strike that isn't obvious without getting down and looking properly. Uneven wear patterns, which point to pressure or tracking issues rather than simple age, are also easy to miss in a thirty-second look before a shift starts.
What a scheduled visit actually catches
A proper scheduled check across a fleet, done in one visit rather than vehicle by vehicle as problems come up, tends to surface the same handful of things every time: tyres approaching the replacement threshold before they become urgent, pressure that's drifted low without anyone noticing, and damage from kerbs or road debris that a driver hasn't flagged because it doesn't look serious yet. Catching all three on a schedule, rather than reactively, is what actually keeps vehicles on the road instead of off it.
Winter changes the maths
The same tread depth that's perfectly adequate in July can be marginal in wet, cold conditions from autumn through to spring. Wet grip and stopping distance both fall away faster as tread wears down, and Scottish winter weather doesn't give much room for a tyre running close to its limit. A fleet running a monthly check through summer often benefits from tightening that to a shorter interval, or being stricter about the replacement threshold, once the clocks go back. It's a small adjustment, but it's the kind of thing that's easy to overlook if tyre checks are just running on autopilot rather than being reviewed against the season.
Building this into how a fleet operates
The practical way to make this work isn't asking already-busy drivers to do more, it's putting a proper check on the calendar and letting someone qualified handle it in one visit. For most vans and light commercial fleets in our patch, that means someone coming to the yard or depot on a set schedule, going through every vehicle, and flagging what's coming up before it turns into a call-out. It's a small change in structure that removes a surprising amount of the reactive scrambling that tyre problems usually cause.
If you're running a fleet and want tyre checks built into a proper schedule instead of hoping problems get spotted in time, our fleet tyre service covers exactly this, regular on-site checks, honest replacement advice, and a fast response when something can't wait for the next visit.
