Tires and tread — Minnesota Permit Test
Tires and tread on the Minnesota permit test — 6 rules, each with the reason behind it and a question on it while it is fresh.
The rules
Tires must support the vehicle’s weight and grip the road properly.
Four patches of rubber, each the size of a hand, are all that holds a ton of car to the road.
Tires must support your vehicle’s weight and grip the road properly.
A tire is illegal in Minnesota if the tread is less than one-sixteenth inch deep.
Tread is what moves water out from under the tire. Below that depth it stops doing it at all.
A tire is illegal if the tread is less than one-sixteenth inch deep.
Tires can lose up to 1 PSI of pressure every month, so check the pressure often.
It leaks away too slowly to see. A tire can be badly soft and still look full.
Tires can lose up to 1 PSI of pressure every month.
Check tire pressure before driving or at least three hours after driving.
Driving heats the air inside and raises the reading, so a warm tire always looks better than it is.
Check tire pressure before driving or at least three hours after driving.
Compare the measured pressure with the sticker inside the driver’s door, not the number on the tire sidewall.
The sidewall number is the tire’s maximum. The sticker is what this car is meant to run.
Compare the measured PSI to the PSI on the sticker inside the driver’s door or in the owner’s manual, not the PSI on the tire’s sidewall.
Tires have less traction on gravel or dirt roads than on concrete or asphalt.
Loose stones roll under the tire, so the wheel turns without the car going where it is pointed.
Tires have less traction on gravel or dirt roads than on concrete or asphalt.
On the test
What two jobs does the manual give a tire?
Supporting the weight and gripping the road. Four patches of rubber, each the size of a hand, are all that holds a ton of car to the road. Minnesota Driver’s Manual, p.24: “Tires must support your vehicle’s weight and grip the road properly.”
How this works
Most practice tests hand you a bank of questions and leave the manual somewhere else. This one puts them together.
You read one law and the reason behind it, then answer a question on that law while it is still fresh. Get it right and you move on; get it wrong and you have found the gap while it is cheap to fix, not on the morning of the exam.
Learning one rule at a time, and proving it immediately, is what turns a manual you skimmed into something you actually know — and it makes studying feel like getting somewhere rather than like waiting to find out.
What it costs
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Where these come from
Every rule here is checked against Minnesota Driver’s Manual, published by the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, and against the state code itself. Last checked 2026-09-22.
- src/assets/drivers-manuals/MN.pdf (Minnesota Driver’s Manual, May 2025, Minnesota Department of Public Safety, Driver and Vehicle Services, retrieved 2026-09-14; sha256 pinned in SOURCES.json)
- src/assets/drivers-manuals/MN.pages.txt (the plain pdftotext fixture every citation here was cut from and verified against; sha256 pinned in SOURCES.json)
- src/assets/drivers-manuals/SOURCES.json, MN entry -- the folio offset of 3 and its basis, the folio marker, the extraction-flag score and the welded compounds it costs, and the record of where the exam shape comes from