Tire placard

Also called tire and loading information placard, tire and loading placard, door jamb sticker, the sticker in the door, tire sticker, door placard, load limit sticker

The tire placard is the yellow and white label in the driver's door jamb that states, in words federal law fixes, the most weight a vehicle's occupants and cargo may add together, along with its seating capacity and the factory tire sizes and cold inflation pressures.

What is the tire placard?

The community calls it the sticker in the door. Federal law calls it the Tire and Loading Information placard and specifies nearly everything about it: FMVSS 110 requires it permanently affixed to the driver's side B-pillar, names the fallback locations for vehicles that lack one, and fixes the colour and format to a figure drawn in the standard, which is where the familiar yellow and white layout comes from.

Its first line is the one that settles arguments, and the wording is mandatory: the combined weight of occupants and cargo should never exceed a stated number of kilograms and pounds. The number behind it is the vehicle capacity weight, calculated as the rated cargo load plus 68 kilograms, about 150 pounds, for every designated seat, so the occupants are already inside it. The placard also carries the seating capacity itself, the sizes of the tires the vehicle left the factory on, and the recommended cold inflation pressures, cold meaning measured before driving rather than after.

Where it came from

The current placard is younger than it feels. It was written in 2002, in the rulemaking that followed the TREAD Act, the law Congress passed after the Firestone tire failures, and the point of the redesign was to put load limits and tire pressures somewhere a driver could not avoid finding them. The owner's-manual rules acquired a matching duty: light-vehicle manuals must explain what the placard is and where it sits.

What it can and cannot tell you

It describes the vehicle as built, which is its strength and its limit. The capacity figure is this vehicle's, in this configuration, which makes it better than any brochure number. But nothing updates it. Bolt on five hundred pounds of bumper, drawers and rack and the placard states the figure it always did; the standard obliges a correction only for weight added between certification and first retail sale, and a new placard only when a vehicle is altered before that first sale. On a built truck, the placard is the budget as issued, and a scale is the only record of how much is left.