How to Properly Check and Inflate Tires on Your Vehicle

Hi, I’m Mike from 1A Auto. We’ve been selling auto parts for over 30 years!

We're going to show you how to check and set your tire pressure properly on your vehicle. On the outside of the tire there is a max pressure. This one is 44 PSI. That is not the pressure that you want to set this tire to. Every manufacturer has an ideal tire pressure for the front and rear tires on a vehicle. To find that information, it should be on a sticker on the inside of the driver's door sill.

So open up the driver's door and right here there's a sticker. It tells you right here what the size is. So if the vehicle was available with multiple sizes of tires, it would have those listed here. This one is only available with one size tire. So for the front tires, the coldest tire pressure, so after the car has been sitting, it hasn't been driven for a little bit, is 33 PSI. The same for the rear is also 33 PSI.

In some vehicles this varies. You might have 35 and 32 or vice versa. It also gives you the pressure for the temporary spare tire, which is 60 PSI. So I'm going to go around. I'm going to check all the tires and see if they're at 33 PSI and if not, we'll adjust them. I'm going to start with the driver's side front tire. You can use a basic tire pressure gauge like this, or we've got a fancy digital one. But you want to remove the valve stem cap. We'll push this mechanical one on. It's one notch above 35, so it's about 36.

Let's just compare that to our digital one. Mechanical ones are pretty accurate. Digital one is definitely a lot easier to read. But either way, you'll get a decent reading on it. So this needs to come down. Basically, I'm going to just push on the little valve stem that's in here with this and just do it a couple times. That took a pound out. On one of these mechanical ones, it's got a little button here—you can just press it. Check that again. You just want to go a little bit at a time. You should definitely do this where you have a way to fill the tire back up in case you go too much. But I'm just going to let out a little bit at a time. 33 and a half, so maybe a couple more presses of that. Perfect, 33 pounds.

Put the cap back on and go check the other wheels. The procedure will be the same for all of them. Again, we're looking for 33 PSI. That one's at 30, so we're going to have to add air to that one. So for example, on the inside of these tools there's a little rubber seal. So when you push it on, you want to make sure you push it all the way on. You don't want to hear any air rushing out. Because if you just push it on lightly and try to get a reading, it reset it. It's going to give you a bad reading.

So real low, and you're just letting air out of the tire. But it needs to seal up like that and you can't hear any air rushing out. So even just touching it like that, I let about a pound of air out.

Now we're going to add air. We've got our air chuck and our compressor hooked up. This one's got a nifty little pressure gauge on it. So again, you got to push this on nice and hard, just like that. It actually tells you, so it's close to 30 on here. We're going to fill it up. I like to reset it by doing this. Because sometimes when you use these gauges, they're not as accurate as using one of these. Alright, that's going to be pretty close.

Let's check it. Perfect, right there at 33 psi. So just repeat checking the tire pressure for all the tires. You do the same. On this car is the same pressure front and rear. But if yours are different, set them appropriately. This way you'll get the best tire wear because your tires will be inflated properly. It will prevent your TPMS light, which is that little annoying yellow light that comes on, on the dash when you have low tires. It'll keep that from coming on, and you'll get better fuel mileage and better ride quality.

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