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Trust me—you really don’t know what you’re missing.
Yes. The reason has to do with the type of tire your car uses, though, not which car you own. Many modern tire designs have a unidirectional tread design, where the tread is designed to rotate in only one direction. This is done for various reasons, the most obvious and common one being for better handling on wet roads. You will find that on tires such as this (and Goodyear’s Aquatread is perhaps the clearest example, though not the only one), that the horizontal groves in the tread are at a swept back as they progress from the inside of the tread to the outside. This helps direct the water away from the tire, making sure that more rubber is in contact with the road, instead of riding on the water (called hydroplaning). If you were to move a tire designed for the left side of the car over to the right side, the groves would be swept forward, greatly reducing their effectiveness in channeling water away from the car.
This page was last modified on Monday, 11-Oct-2004 20:04:23 PDT.
