About a year ago I bought a 1984 380SL which has been a dream come true. However, in the docs that came with the car there is no indication old how old the tires are.

Is there a quick and easy way to determine a tires age?

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1984 380SL (58,000 miles)
Anthracite on grey
1997 BMW 540i
Alpine Silver on Burgundy

I believe that since 1995, tires sold in the US have had to identify the week and year of a tire's manufacture. Tire Information Number (TIN) is found on tire sidewalls. This number, a twelve or thirteen character series of letter and numbers is industry code to identify the manufacturer, date of manufacture and tire size. You can check the code by contacting the tire maker.

You can look at the last four digits of the DOT number on the tire, i.e 1103 would mean the 11th week of 2003. I'm not sure if this is standard for all manufac. - probably tireracks website explains it better.

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I'd rather argue against a hundred idiots, than have one agree with me. — Winston Churchill

Thank guys, that gives me something to check out. Much appreciated.

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1984 380SL (58,000 miles)
Anthracite on grey
1997 BMW 540i
Alpine Silver on Burgundy

The date code is as follows: wwyy (ww= week # of year and yy=last 2 digits of year). For example, 5101 means the 51st week of 2001.

There may be a triangle after the date code. That means the tire was made in the 1990's. So in my example above, if there was a triangle after the 5101, it would be made in the 51st week of 1991.

By using these numbers, I found that the spare in my 560SL is original to 1986 (!) and the tires on the car when I bought it were 7 years old. Unfortunately I didn't look at the date code on the tires until one blew up.. probably because it was 7 years old and all crackly!

Neal

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'83 300SD 335,000km (207k) mi SOLD
'87 560SL 163,000km (101k mi) SOLD
'86 300SDL 356,000km (220k mi) SOLD
'92 500SEL 250,000km (155k mi) SOLD
'90 300SL 140,000km (87k mi) SOLD
'01 S430 260,000km (161k mi) SOLD
'03 SL500 167,000km (104k mi) SOLD
'07 S550 4MATIC 235,000km (146k mi) SOLD
'07 GL320 CDI 4MATIC 348,000km (215k mi)
'13 GL350 BlueTec 4MATIC 170,000km (105k mi)
'14 SL550 72,000km (43k mi)