How to remove tire marks of my garage floor?

If you happened to have recently redone your garage floor or driveway, the last thing you will want to see on your fresh epoxied floor is tire marks. However, tire marks are more than common in car garages, even on brand new epoxied ones.
There are three different types of tire markings that you can get in your garage.
To understand how to clean tire marks of your garage floor, you'll first need to understand what tire marks are.

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. Plasticizers are a combination of polymer compounds and other chemicals that are used in the tire industry to create a more flexible rubber compound. This flexible compound will give a tire more traction and help to keep it soft and pliable in cold weather. However, when you park your hot tires on your garage floor, these plasticizers start leaking from the tires into your concrete floor.
When your car is in your garage or driveway, 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 performance 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 to remove tire marks from my garage floor?

So how easy is to remove tire marks from your sealed garage floor or driveway. Well this really depends on how long the tire marks have been on the floor and on the quality of your topcoat. The secret to easily removing tire marks is, to remove them as soon as they appeared.

The easiest way to attempt removing tire marks is to soak the area for a few minutes first with a good cleaner or a concrete degreaser. After it has soaked, use a semi stiff nylon bristle brush to scrub the tire marks. Avoid if possible using a scrub pad as these can de-gloss the finish. Don't be surprised if the tire marks don't disappear from the first time. It can take a lot of soaking and scrubbing, depending on how long the marks have been on the floor.

If this method doesn't work or the build up is quite big, you can always use a product designed for removing tire marks.

The best way to prevent car tire markings is routinely cleaning your garage floor. Using a mop with mild detergent once or twice a week will prevent any build ups or staining.

Lastly if you are not big on driving and your car tends to sit more in your garage than moving on the road, you can always place carpet, carboard or nylon sheets under your tires. Anything really that you can easily discard after awhile.