Winter tyres are the law in Germany when it snows, and never in Britain

British drivers tend to assume winter tyres are a continental enthusiasm rather than a legal requirement. In Germany they are a legal requirement, and the way the rule is written catches people out even when they know it exists.

Germany: a condition, not a season

Germany does not run a winter tyre season. There is no date in October when the rule switches on and no date in April when it stops.

The requirement in the road traffic regulations is situational. If the road is in one of the named conditions, black ice, packed snow, slush, ice or hoar frost, then the vehicle must be on tyres carrying the right marking. If the road is dry, it need not be, whatever the month.

This is more demanding than a seasonal rule, not less. A seasonal rule you can satisfy once and forget. A situational one means the tyres have to already be on the car before the weather arrives, because the rule takes effect with the first frost rather than with a date you had in the diary.

The tyres themselves must meet a defined marking standard, and for larger vehicles the requirement applies to the driven axles and the front steering axle rather than to every wheel.

The bit that surprises people

There is a fallback in the rule, and it is not a way out.

A driver caught out in those conditions on unsuitable tyres is required to keep a following distance of half the speedometer reading in metres and not exceed 50 km/h. That is not permission to carry on as normal. It is a constraint that makes a motorway journey effectively impossible, and it exists to get you off the road safely rather than to excuse the tyres.

Driving in the named conditions without compliant tyres is an offence, and being the vehicle that blocks a road because it cannot climb a hill in snow attracts a heavier penalty than merely being wrongly equipped.

Britain: no requirement at all

Britain has no winter tyre law. The only tyre requirement is the minimum tread depth across the central three quarters of the tread, applied all year, and that is a floor rather than a standard.

Winter tyres are legal here, sold here, and demonstrably better below about seven degrees, which in Britain is most of the winter and a good deal of the spring. They are simply not compulsory, and the overwhelming majority of British cars run all season tyres year round.

That works because Britain rarely gets sustained snow. It also means a British car driven to Germany in February is, by default, not compliant.

What this means for a work trip

If you drive for work and the work takes you into Germany, Austria or much of central Europe between autumn and spring, the tyres are part of the trip planning, not an afterthought. A hire car collected locally will be correctly shod. Your own car will not be, unless you have made it so.

It is also worth knowing that the cost of complying is a business cost of that journey. If a set of tyres or a hire car upgrade exists because of a business trip, it belongs in the record for that trip alongside the tolls and the fuel, rather than disappearing into general motoring expenditure where nobody will ever attribute it.

The wider point

This is one of a family of requirements that are invisible from Britain because Britain does not have them: environmental stickers for city centres, vignettes for motorways, mandatory equipment in the boot. None is difficult. All of them are enforced, and all of them are cheaper to arrange before you leave than at the roadside.

Sources

• § 2 Straßenverkehrs-Ordnung, including the winter tyre requirement at paragraph 3a
• § 36 Straßenverkehrs-Zulassungs-Ordnung, the tyre marking standard the rule refers to
• Annex 6: vehicle maintenance, safety and security (The Highway Code)
• Driving abroad (GOV.UK)

General information, not legal advice. Requirements differ by country and change: check before you travel.