How do i protect my garage floor from tire marks?

Seeing tire marks on your garage floor is one of the most common sights inside garages and it can be heart breaking. If you've spent a lot of time and money on doing your garage floor, the last thing you will want to see on it, is tire marks.
To know how to prevent tire marks from appearing on your garage floor, first you need to know what tire marks are.
There a couple of different tire marks that can occur on your floor. All tire marks are not the same and they appear on different surfaces, under different conditions.

Plasticizer Migration

Most often tire marks on concrete garage floors or driveways are caused by hot tires. For example, if your car has been sitting in the garage for a while, your tires will be cold to touch. However, if you've just parked your car inside your garage, after going to the mall or for a drive, your tires will be hot to touch. This is because heat builds up in your tires due to a friction between the tires and the road.
Tire manufactures use plasticizer to soften your car tires. When the tires are hot, these plasticizers can transfer from the tires to your concrete floor.
When you park your car in your garage, your tires tend to be in contact with the same spot in the garage every night. Over time, you will end up seeing four tire marks on the spot where your car tires sit on your garage. This is due to the plasticizers build up on your concrete garage floor.
And if you think high quality tires will not leave marks on your floor, think again. High quality tires, use higher quantity of plasticizers.

Hot Tire Pick Up

When your car tires are hot, they expand. When they cool down, they shrink. Because of the weight of the car and the shrinkage of the tires, just a wee bit of the concrete sealer or the epoxy coating is pulled off the concrete garage floor. This builds up over a period of time as the car is pretty much parked at the same spot every night.
This can be most noticeable when you have a coating on your floor that has not bonded with the concrete floor. When that's the case, your car tires can lift a big chunk of the coating when you drive off.

Plain Muck

Let's face it, roads are not the cleanest places. When you drive, your tires collect whatever is on the road, from oils, dirt, rocks and even roadkill.
When you drive in, your tires are going to leave some of that on your driveway and your garage floor. They are easy to detect as they are streaks. Thankfully they are also not that hard to clean.

How do i protect my garage floor from tire marks?

Epoxy coatings are your best bet if you want to protect your garage floor or driveway from tire marks and other stains and damages.
Epoxy is really hard, smooth & glossy. These features combined with the flexibility of polyurethane topcoats are helpful as epoxy floors pick up very little of the tire chemicals that are released when the tire is hot. As epoxy is also non-porous, tire chemicals or car oils will not be able to soak into it, making them extremely easy to clean.

To make your floor more decorative, you can add flake chips to your epoxy coating. This will not only add a splash of color to your floors, but will also hide any imperfections in the floor and an extra layer of protection. If you wan to take it to the next level, you can opt for metallic epoxy, which will transform your garage to out of this world.