Every new car, van and truck tyre sold in Europe comes with one: a single sheet carrying three graded letters, a decibel figure and up to two pictograms. There is not one word of explanation on it. Here is what each part of it is, in the order you read it — touch a number on the label, or work down the list underneath.
Drawn here, not reproduced: the printed label’s artwork is specified in the regulation down to the millimetre, and this is its layout and reading order redrawn to stay legible on a phone. The values are invented to show where they sit — the supplier and pattern lines are placeholders rather than a real brand, and the QR square is a picture of one rather than a code that leads anywhere.
1 QR code
Reads: Scan it
Opens this exact product in EPREL, the EU’s public product register — every tyre sold in Europe has an entry, and the entry is the supplier’s own declaration on the record. It is the one part of the label you can check rather than take on trust: if the register shows a different size or different grades, the label is not the tyre’s. A label with no QR code at all is one from before 2021.
Not on the tyre itself. Nothing on a sidewall carries a grade, so there is nothing to hunt for in the rubber — this is the most common wrong turn people take with the label, and it costs them ten minutes with a torch.
Three things, and only three. Each letter below has a page of its own; the summaries here are the same words those pages carry.
Rolling resistance: the energy the tyre loses to flexing as it rolls, which the engine or the battery has to put back. Five classes, A to E.
Wet braking distance, measured against a reference tyre. Five classes, A to E — and the only grade on the sheet that is about whether you stop in time.
What the tyre makes people outside the car listen to, measured at the roadside with the engine off. Three classes, A to C, printed beside the measured value in decibels.
Compare within one class, and within one size. C1 car, C2 van and C3 truck tyres are graded against different thresholds, so the same letter stands for a different measured result on each — a C3 graded B has not met a C1’s B. And the best grade on sale is a question about your size, not about the label: the A you are looking for may not be made in 205/55R16 at all. Every size page here counts what the EU register actually holds in that size, grade by grade.
Wet grip is the one with a consequence. Fuel efficiency is money, noise is courtesy, and wet grip is braking distance — the gap from A to E is about four car lengths. If one grade decides the purchase, in a wet country, it is this one.
On an electric car, read the fuel grade as range. It is rolling resistance either way; on a battery it is the label grade with the largest effect on how far the car goes.
Where two tyres share a noise letter, compare the decibels. A whole class covers a range, and the measured value is printed for exactly this reason. Remember it is the noise at the roadside, not at your ear.
The pictograms are pass or blank. Snow grip and ice grip are not graded — the mark is printed if the tyre met the requirement and left off if it did not, and ice grip can only appear on a C1 car tyre.
The label’s real risk is not that it is wrong. It is that three letters look like a report card, and this is what they leave out:
The supplier does — the values come from the testing the tyre was type-approved on, declared by whoever places it on the market and registered by them in EPREL, the EU’s public product database. It is not a certificate from an independent test house, and authorities check it by sampling the market rather than by testing every product. That is what the QR code is for: it opens the register entry for that exact product, and a label whose entry says something different is a label worth questioning.
Regulation (EU) 2020/740 has been compulsory since May 2021. Before it, Regulation (EC) 1222/2009 ran scales from A to G with classes left empty, showed noise as one to three sound waves with no letter class, carried no QR code and no snow or ice pictogram, and covered car and van tyres only — truck tyres were added by the current regulation. Old stock and old listings still carry it, and the two are not comparable letter for letter.
Defined in EU regulation. Regulation (EU) 2020/740, Annex I (classification of tyres). What this app does not hold is the regulation’s own boundary table — the rolling resistance coefficient in kg/t and the wet grip index that separate one class from the next, which differ for C1, C2 and C3. No host will serve the regulation text to this network, so those numbers are absent rather than guessed at. Every page here says what a grade means and where it sits; none of them claims to know the exact figure it had to beat.
This is a European document, and so is everything counted against it here: EPREL covers tyres placed on the EU market. A size sold in South Africa, the Americas or Asia may be made in grades no EU label was ever printed for, and the register will not know about it.