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Tire pressure, or any pressure - psi, bar, kPa

Your car's door placard says psi, the pump at a European garage shows bar, a lot of modern gauges show kPa - same pressure, three different numbers.

Common passenger car tire pressures

psibarkPa
302.07206.8
322.21220.6
352.41241.3
382.62262.0

Most passenger cars run 30-35 psi (about 2.1-2.4 bar / 207-241 kPa); SUVs and light trucks often run higher, 35-44 psi. Always use the pressure on your vehicle's door placard or owner's manual, not the maximum figure printed on the tire sidewall - that's the tire's limit, not the recommended setting. Check pressure cold, before driving or after the car has sat for a few hours; driving heats tires and can raise the reading by 4-6 psi, which would give a falsely high number.

Also: ground pressure (force spread over an area)

A different, related question - how much pressure a weight puts on the surface below it, given the contact area. Useful for load-spreading questions (a crane mat, a tracked vehicle) rather than tire inflation.

Find pressure
Find area
Find force

A 20-tonne excavator on two wide tracks (3.355m x 0.6m each) puts down about 48.7 kPa of ground pressure - similar to a person walking. The same weight on a small footprint would be dramatically higher: a person standing in narrow stiletto heels can put over 13 MPa on the ground at the point of contact, hundreds of times more than the same person's weight spread across a flat shoe. This is exactly why tracked vehicles use wide tracks instead of narrow wheels on soft ground, and why a crane needs a mat under its outriggers.

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