My daughter just had a new front tire put on her Audi A6 AWD, 2001 car and now her traction control will not turn on. I’ve been told that being it is all wheel drive that the tires need to have the same wear and that all tire will need to be replaced to prevent damage. Is this true or is someone just trying to sell me expensive tires?
Most likely is true with an all wheel drive system. Read your owner’s manual.
Audi As published in their vehicle owner’s manual, “rolling radius of all 4 tires must remain the same” or within 4/32-inch of each other in remaining tread depth.
Yes, it’s true, and yes, it really is important to read the Owner’s Manual!
However, it is not necessary to buy 4 tires.
Instead, you can have the new tire “shaved” so that it has the same tread depth as the 3 old tires. Not every tire shop has the equipment for this, so I would suggest a few minutes paging through the yellow pages and several phone calls to large tire shops in order to find out which ones can “shave” the new tire for you.
Hint: Performance-oriented tire shops are the ones that are most likely to have this type of equipment.
I would suggest that you take care of this right away, as driving for more than…maybe 100-200 miles with the mismatched tires will lead to VERY expensive damage to the AWD system.
Thank you so much for your comments and suggestions - we’ll get this taken care of immediately!