Van Nuys gets 7.8 days at 100F. LAX gets none.

Almost every article about tires in hot climates writes Los Angeles as one place. It is not. Two official weather stations twenty miles apart, inside the same municipal boundary, describe two different problems, and a single heat sentence is wrong for half the city whichever half you write it for.

Here are the NOAA 1991-2020 annual normals for all four Los Angeles stations, in one table.

Station	Days a year at or above 80F	At or above 90F	At or above 100F	Annual mean maximum
Los Angeles International (LAX)	23.3	2.5	0.0	69.0F
Los Angeles Downtown / USC	112.7	21.4	1.3	75.2F
Burbank–Bob Hope	137.7	43.2	3.7	76.4F
Van Nuys Airport	148.3	63.2	7.8	77.0F

Van Nuys has more than six times as many 80F days as LAX. On 100F days the comparison does not even divide, because LAX's normal is zero.

What this actually changes

Heat is one of the two things NHTSA names as the mechanism of tire ageing. From its March 2014 summary of its tire-ageing work:

Proper tire maintenance is important for good wear and the safety performance of a tire, but tire aging is a degradation phenomenon that can occur due to the chemical reaction within the rubber components with oxygen and heat.

and

Tires in service in the northern states are generally replaced before tire aging becomes an issue, but aging is still a concern in the Sun Belt states for light vehicle tires, in the summer months, during the day, when they are driven at highway speeds.

A sourcing note that travels with every quotation from that document on this site: nhtsa.gov returned 403 to every attempt we made on 2026-09-20, so the copy we read and quote is the one hosted by the trade magazine Tire Review, at the URL in our sources. The wording is verbatim from it and the title page is intact; we have not read the agency's own copy.

What we are not going to do is dress that mechanism up with a sunshine or UV number. NOAA's 1991-2020 normals carry no sunshine element for any Los Angeles station, and the irradiance source we would have used was unreachable on 2026-09-20. "Relentless California sun" is a phrase, not a measurement, and you will not find it on our pages. Heat, dryness and how old the cars are is what we can show you.

October is the trap

On the coast the hot weeks are not in summer, and a seasonal campaign built on a generic summer calendar is about six weeks early for half of Los Angeles.

Days a year with a maximum at or above 90F, by month, on the 1991-2020 monthly normals:

• Los Angeles International — October 0.9, September 0.6, August 0.3, November 0.3, July 0.1, March 0.1, April 0.1, January 0.0, February 0.0, May 0.0, December 0.0. June is published as a missing-data sentinel rather than a value, so we report it as not published rather than as zero.
• Los Angeles Downtown / USC — September 5.4, August 5.0, October 3.1, July 3.0.
• Van Nuys Airport — August 17.2, July 15.2, September 13.4, June 5.9.

October is LAX's hottest month by this measure, and July has fewer 90F days there than November does. The same ordering shows on the 80F count: LAX peaks in October at 4.7 days and September at 4.5, ahead of August's 3.7 and July's 2.0. Downtown peaks in August at 24.2 and Van Nuys in July and August at 29.2 and 29.5 — effectively every day of both months.

The records agree. LAX's all-time maximum in its full daily record is 110F, set on 26 September 1963. Van Nuys Airport's highest maximum in its own record is 118F, on 6 September 2020. Both are late-season.

Only inland does the ordinary summer shape appear. So an inland tire calendar runs June to September and a coastal one runs September to October, and they are not the same calendar.

The dry season is long, and this part is the whole city

The two halves of Los Angeles disagree about heat and agree about rain.

At LAX the annual precipitation normal is 12.82 inches. May through October together are 1.15 inches — 9.0 percent of the year's rain falling in half the year (DERIVED: 0.22 + 0.08 + 0.03 + 0.05 + 0.21 + 0.56 = 1.15; 1.15 divided by 12.82 = 8.97 percent). Downtown is wetter overall at 14.93 inches and the shape is identical: July 0.01 inches, August 0.04.

The extreme version, computed from the complete LAX daily record of 29,969 days carrying a maximum temperature from 1944 to 2026: the longest unbroken run of consecutive days recording less than a hundredth of an inch of rain is 225 days, from 12 February to 24 September 1997. Runs were broken at any gap in the record, so that is a floor rather than a ceiling.

Over that same 29,969-day record, LAX has recorded 46 days at or above 100F — 0.15 percent of days with a maximum (DERIVED: 46 divided by 29,969) — and 391 days at or above 90F. Van Nuys's daily file is much less complete: 11,155 days with a maximum, of which 2,378 were at or above 90F (21.3 percent) and 462 at or above 100F (4.1 percent), each DERIVED over that 11,155-day denominator. Because those two records are not the same length, the raw counts cannot be compared with each other. The normals in the table at the top of this page can, and that is what they are for.

The third variable is how old the car is

Heat acts on rubber over time, so the fleet's age matters as much as the thermometer.

The California DMV's registration snapshot at 31 December 2025 records 29,658,134 registered light-duty vehicles in California, of which 21,384,861 — 72.1 percent — are model year 2020 or older (DERIVED: 21,384,861 divided by 29,658,134). 13,682,322, or 46.1 percent, are model year 2015 or older.

Inside Los Angeles the spread is wide. Across the seventeen Los Angeles ZIP areas in our research where the DMV figures are usable, the share of light-duty registrations at model year 2020 or older runs from 57.0 percent in 91403, Sherman Oaks, and 57.5 percent in 91367, Woodland Hills, up to 80.9 percent in 90044 in South Los Angeles and 80.6 percent in 90002, Watts. That is a 23.9-point gap inside one city, ranked over those seventeen ZIPs and nothing wider.

One ZIP is deliberately excluded. 90045 — Westchester, Playa del Rey and LAX — shows 101,503 registered light-duty vehicles against 41,786 residents, 39,968 of them model year 2025. Those are airport rental fleets and no fleet-age figure built on them means anything.

And a lot of Los Angeles cars are barely driven. The American Community Survey 2020-2024 five-year estimates put 19.5 percent of City of Los Angeles workers at home rather than commuting, rising to 44.7 percent in 90291, Venice, 37.6 percent in 91403, Sherman Oaks, 32.4 percent in 90025, West Los Angeles, and 31.2 percent in 90066, Mar Vista. A car driven a few thousand miles a year keeps its tread and loses its rubber anyway. Tire age and when to replace is the page on that, and it is the argument that fits this city better than a tread-depth one.

So which sentence applies to you

Neighbourhood pages for the two halves: Venice, Mar Vista and San Pedro on the coastal side; Van Nuys and Sherman Oaks in the Valley.

If you park west of the 405 and near the water, your tires are not being cooked the way an article about Phoenix describes. They are ageing slowly in mild air, often on a car that does not move much, and the date code will finish them before the tread does. Your hot weeks are late September and October, not July.

If you park in the San Fernando Valley, the heat story is real and ordinary: 148.3 days a year at or above 80F and 63.2 at or above 90F at Van Nuys, peaking in July and August. Check pressures cold and check them more often in summer, because heat and under-inflation compound.

Everyone in the city gets seven dry months, no freeze at all — 0.0 days a year with a maximum at or below 32F at all four stations — and the same low legal tread floor of one thirty-second of an inch under CVC 27465(b)(1), which is not the number the penny test measures.

What we do about it

We measure all four tires and the spare, read the date codes, and set the pressures cold against the door placard rather than the sidewall. California's 17 CCR 95550 requires that check and inflate at the time of any maintenance or repair service, requires the measured pressures to be printed on the invoice, and requires a gauge accurate to within 2 psi. You get the numbers, not a verdict.

If the tires are fine we say so. If they are not, we supply and fit at the same address on the same visit; we do not fit tires bought elsewhere and we do not sell used tires.

More Los Angeles pages: tire age and when to replace, the California tread law, mobile tire repair, a slow leak, chain control and snow tires, street sweeping and mobile service, and our Los Angeles service area. Generally: when to replace your tires, what the tire pressure placard means, a blowout on the highway, and all-season against all-weather against winter tires.

Our price: $145

A mobile puncture repair is $145 for the first tire and $50 for each additional tire in the same visit, with no separate call-out fee. Replacement is priced on screen before you give us a phone number. Repair is subject to on-site inspection; an unrepairable tire is charged as an inspection, not as a repair. For a fit we need level, paved, legal ground with room to work at one corner of the car, and in this city we check the street-sweeping sign for your block first.

Questions people ask

• Is Los Angeles hard on tires? It depends which Los Angeles. Van Nuys Airport averages 148.3 days a year at or above 80F and 7.8 at or above 100F on the 1991-2020 normals. Los Angeles International averages 23.3 and 0.0. Both are inside the same city.
• When is the hot season here? Inland, June to September. On the coast, September and October: LAX averages 0.9 days at or above 90F in October against 0.1 in July, and its all-time record of 110F was set on 26 September 1963.
• Does the sun wreck tires in California? Heat and oxygen are the mechanism NHTSA names. We are not putting a sunshine or UV figure next to that, because NOAA's normals carry no sunshine element for any Los Angeles station and we could not source one.
• Do tires age faster if I barely drive? They age on a clock rather than on an odometer. NHTSA's position is that ageing "can affect the performance of the tires even if they have adequate tread and proper inflation". In a city where 19.5 percent of workers work from home, that is a common situation rather than an edge case.
• How often should I check pressures? Cold, before the car has moved, against the door placard. More often in summer if you park inland, because heat and under-inflation compound. California defines an under-inflated tire as 1 psi or more below the placard rating.
• Is there a freeze risk for tires here? No. All four Los Angeles stations average 0.0 days a year with a maximum at or below 32F, and LAX and Downtown both average 0.0 nights at or below freezing.