The National Tyre Distributors Association held a press conference to reveal the results of its TyreCheck 2000 campaign. This was part of a wider European initiative to increase tyre awareness and collect data in support of a campaign to increase the legal minimum tread depth. The UK campaign lasted a week and over 37,500 tyres were checked. A depressing 10% were below the 1.6mm legal minimum and a further 17% had tread depths below 2mm, which is the level being proposed as the new legal minimum. 26% were damaged in some way and 46% incorrectly inflated. Spare tyres were also checked and 33% of these had a tread depth below 2mm. 66% were wrongly inflated. In a telephone survey of people who had recently bought tyres, 75% did not know the legal tread depth and 43% said they check their pressures regularly; a figure not borne out by the above statistics. It is planned to repeat the exercise next year, hopefully on a larger scale, and the results will be used to lobby individual governments and European authorities through Bipaver for a change in the tyre laws in Europe.