eli5: Why can you only learn your proper tire pressure from the car and not from the tires themselves. Wouldn’t different kinds of tires need different pressures on the same car?

Question

Same tires, different cars = different recommended tire pressure

Different tires, same car = same recommended tire pressure

This doesn’t make sense to me. Why is this?

In: Engineering

Answer 1

To try to simplify this discussion away from the technical aspects of tires, suspensions, and cars; instead of thinking of the tires as balloons to be inflated to a particular size, think of them instead as mattresses to be adjusted to the different people lying on them.