How to check the age of your car tires

LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- You depend on them every day to get you safely where you need to go. But do you have any idea how old the tires on your car are? Even if they look brand new, they could be 4, 5, or even 6 years old.

Tiffany Sanders said she heard a loud bang as the tire on her Ford Expedition came apart, sending the vehicle careening off Highway 395 near Victorville.

"The result of it was my whole family was injured, and my middle daughter passed away," said Sanders.

Sanders told the California Highway Patrol that the vehicle and its tires had just been checked during a routine service. But the tires may have had a hidden problem.

"At the time the truck was sold to Tiffany Sanders in August 2011, the tire that failed was already 6 years old," said Christine Spagnoli, Sanders' attorney.

That was two years before the crash. The tread can separate in an older tire. The separated tread can wrap around the axle and cause a loss of control. While tire treads last much longer than they used to, time is still their enemy, causing rubber compounds to break down. Sunlight and heat age them even more.

"If you live in a warm climate, you're going to accelerate the aging process. You're going to accelerate that material degradation," said tire expert Sean Kane.

So how old is too old? Not everyone agrees. Most major carmakers, including Ford, say six years is the maximum before your tires should be replaced.

The tire industry says 10, though some manufacturers add that tires should be inspected by a professional at the 5-year mark and every year thereafter.

Safety advocates are pushing to make tire age limits mandatory. By law, any passenger vehicle tire sold in the U.S. must have the date molded into the side to indicate when it was made. Look for a four-digit code often surrounded by an oval. For example, if a tire says "5013," that means it was made the 50th week of 2013.

And even if your tires look fine upon a casual glance, check the date. The aging insides that you can't see are what can fail, causing potentially dangerous problems on the road.

Watch an instructional video on how to check the age of your tires.

If you can't watch the instructional video, check out the directions below:

1. On the side of your tire, near the inner ring, you should be able to find a string of letters and numbers that begins with DOT.

2. Follow the string to the end until you get to a series of four numbers.

3. Those four numbers represent a "date code" but it's not as easy as you think.

4. The first two numbers represent the week the tire was made, and the last two indicate the year. So a tire code that says "1303" would mean the tire was made in the 13th week, or the beginning of April, of 2003.