FORS have recently released their latest guide in their long list of road safety guides and advice for their members, the latest one to be published is a new tyre management guide which is available for FORS members online. The guide provides a range of useful information for all commercial vehicle operators such as best practice for reducing tyre wear, as well the role tyres play in increasing road safety and reducing our environmental impact from vehicles.
This guide has been published with the aim of helping FORS members comply with Bronze requirements throughout the United Kingdom whether they operate LGVs, vans, passenger carrying vehicles or car fleets. The requirements for Bronze accreditation stipulate that you must have a tyre management policy and supporting procedures in place to help ensure tyres are correctly managed. As well as this, members can also benefit from a variety of advice within the guide about how to build their tyre management policy. Sonia Hayward, FORS Manager, said “Correctly and accurately managed and maintained tyres make fleets safer and can lead to reduced emissions and real fuel savings for operators.”
An area that commonly goes unspoken by people is the role that effective tyre management can have on increasing a fleets fuel efficiency. Fully inflated well managed tyres provide vehicles with a better foundation to complete their journeys, where as under inflated tyres will ultimately mean that drivers will need to use more petrol to compensate for the loss of air pressure, figures to back this up suggest that for every 10% of decreased tyre pressure fuel consumption increases by 2%.
Contrasting the under inflated issue is the issue of over inflated tyres which create a significant safety issue, the increased pressure will mean that less tread is making contact with the road altering vehicle braking distances and handling. Therefore, operators need to take care and ensure they are pumping tyres to their correct pressure settings.
Overall this guide does offer FORS members a comprehensive range of information relating to tyre safety and effective management. The checklists also provide a step by step walkthrough towards ticking the tyre management box associated with FORS Bronze.
We provide an optional tyre husbandry service for all of our customers whereby we manage all areas of tyre husbandry on our customers behalf, efficiently managing them to ensure they provide the very best cost per mile ratio while always remaining compliant.
For more information about the FORS tyre guide please visit this link: https://www.fors-online.org.uk/cms/news/press-release-fors-issues-robust-tyre-maintenance-guide-help-members-stay-safe-reduce-emissions/