Ring Automotive Programmable Digital Tyre & Tread Depth Gauge (RTG7) Review

What We Say

What is it?

With fuel prices ever increasing and the state of the roads ever decreasing it's never been so important to make sure that your tyres are in good shape, and that also means keeping an eye on your tread depth and tyre pressures. The Ring Automotive Programmable Digital Tyre Pressure Gauge has been designed to be easy to use to help you get the most out of your tyres.

The Ring Automotive RTG7 has a 360 degree swivel air valve head, to make reading the display easy wherever the valve is. The backlit LCD screen will report your tyre pressure in PSI, bar, kpa or kg/cm units with a range of 0-99 psi / 0- 7 bar. It also has a small built in LED light to make it easier to find that tyre value in low light.

This tyre pressure gauge can be programmed to store your cars tyres pressures, so no more looking in the manual or around the door pillars to find out what they should be.

It also features a built-in tread depth gauge allowing you to use the slider to determine approximate tread depth.

It currently retails at around £18 (but you can find it as low as £13) and comes with a foam carry case to keep it protected whilst not in use.

How we tested it?

We tested it on a number of vehicles'tyres ensuring the readings matched with other tyre pressure readers to ensure accuracy.

We Liked:

• The ability to store your tyre pressures is a useful feature, it means once it's programmed anyone would be able to monitor their tyre pressures with ease.
• The backlit display and small LED light makes it easy to check your pressures in low light situations.
• Small enough to fit in your glove box meaning it can always be on hand - it even comes with a handy case to keep it safe.

We didn't like:

• We have to say although the depth gauge is useful it's slightly awkward to use and doesn't give you an accurate reading, but does allow you to get an indication of depth to investigate further if required.
• The tyre pressure memory will only store one set of tyres, although it's likely it would only be kept in one car anyway it would be great to be able to store multiple vehicle data.

Overall:

The one thing that lets it down is the tread depth gauge, it's a bit fiddly and it hard to get an accurate reading, so although we would use it to get a rough value we would also use another dedicate depth gauge to get an exact value. The tyre pressure side of it is very good, the ability to store what your tyre pressure should be and then quickly use the 360 degree swivel head to take an accurate reading is very useful. Overall, it's a useful tool to have in your glovebox and is relatively inexpensive.

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