Rxmfn7

iTrader: (4)

Im shopping for new tires for my '02 S2000. Its my daily driver, I do like to have some fun with it but honestly longevity is my main concern. My last set of tires for it was Fuzion Zr-i, and I have never, ever had a tire that has worn on me so fast. I seriously have less than 5000 miles on them and the rear tires are completely bald. It is a nice, even wear, Ive had alignment checked, I dont do burnouts or drive like an *** 100% of the time, the tires just have no tread left. They have a treadwear rating of 320. When looking for new tires on tirerack (just cheap summer tires) they have Sumitomo HTR Zs for a really nice price, but treadwear rating is 160. Should this "rating" really be something I should even bother looking at? I was under the assumption that there really wasnt any standard and it was basically up to the manufacturer to rate their own tire.

Mahjik

iTrader: (1)

Basically, yes. However, it's a good impression if you judge the wear rating on different levels of tires from the same manufacturer. It just doesn't work so well when comparing ratings across manufacturers.

Rxmfn7

iTrader: (4)

Thanks. You usually seems pretty well-informed about tire choices, care to give me your opinion on what tire you would chose for my application? Basically I just want a decent cheap tire that will last. That 160 treadwear rating of the Sumitomos kinda scares me away. Here is the tirerack link page:


http://www.tirerack.com/tires/Compar...playResults=10

GoodfellaFD3S

iTrader: (213)

I think the Kumho Ecsta MX is a great choice, I've read the treadwear is pretty acceptable and it's a nice performance tire to boot. If you search you'll find lots of great threads on it

Black91n/a

In a word, no they don't mean a thing. See below for an explanation, taken from: http://www.canadiandriver.com/forum/...,56529.20.html (see capriracer's post).


OK, it may be time for me to wade in - "Down, you 'Gators!".

For those of you who aren't familiar with me, I'm a tire engineer for a major manufacturer. You'll find my handle in a lot of web sites devoted to cars and tires. My employer isn't too keen on my publically posting, so I'll keep who that is to myself and let what I post speak for itself.

I do this for fun and to try to provide some background info - this is is one ocassion where it seems to be needed.

Let's talk tread wear for a moment.

There are a lot of things that influence tread wear. While I know of no study that has put this all together, here's my rank order of the influences:

1) Straight line driving vs corners: Most tire wear occurs when you are cornering. The more you drive in a straight line, the more wear you will get out of your tires. Think of it as "Turns per Mile" where a turn is a substantially 90 degree turn- the "leaf" part of a "clover leaf" would be "3" turns. I've had the same tire (OK, different sets, but the same size / design) go as low as 3,500 miles and as far as 100,000 miles - and the difference was "Turns per Mile" (OK, OK, #2 was involved as well!) The average driver seems to be in the 1.1 per mile range.

2) Road surface: There are areas that have pretty abrasive roads. Southern Florida comes to mind, where the concrete uses limestone that has not been in the ground very long, and the sea shells are quite evident - and SHARP!! They tend to slice the tire until the surface wears in. - then they get slippery!

3) Alignment: I'm only going to talk about toe, because it's much more easy to visualize.

If the toe spec on a car is zero degrees (I picked this so it's easier to do the math) and you set a tire to get 0.06 degrees more toe per side than the spec (that's 1/32nd of an inch for us old timers.), then this is like driving the tire sideways 1 mile for every 1,000 miles forward you go.

So guess what the typical tolerance for toe is? That's right - twice that!! Did I mention that the amount of sideways motion isn't proportional to the amount of toe? The more toe you put in, you get even more sideways motion!

4) Driving style: "Spirited" driving obvious induces a slip angle into the tires and that causes wear.

5) Inflation pressure: Please don't ask to find the study that verifies rank order placement here - but there is one!

6) The actual wear resistance of the tire: Notice how far down the list this is.

I put it here because generally, folks select tires within a fairly tight range of treadwear ratings. For example, A guy buying tires for his Buick LeSabre is not going to look twice at a set of "GoodGrips" with a 150 treadwear rating. He's going to stay in the higher end.

This brings me to the UTQG treadwear rating system.

Yes, there is a test and it has to be run over a given course, and it produces - oh, let's say "reasonably" reproducible results. But there are 3 problems.

1) The test is only 7,200 miles long. Not much wear takes place in that distance, so predicting the wear out point at 10 times the distance - well, it does stretch credulity.

2) The wear is compared to a control tire. However, the control tire is a given size (I'm thinking it is a medium size passenger car size) and it doesn't fit on many vehicles. So if the tire I want to test is strictly an SUV tire, the procedure allows a rating based on an intermediate step - compare/compare, so to speak.

3) The rating on the tire doesn't have to be the rating recieved on the test. So a tire could get a 760 rating based on the test but the marketing folks might not want one so high, so the tire will reach the market with (say) a 640 rating.

Needless to say the treadwear warranty and the UTQG rating need to be "in sync".

So to the problem at hand.

Master,

I was going to guess your original RSA's were on a GM product - but I looked back over the posts and realized you told us that in an earlier post!

GM likes to have their tires get 40,000 miles (65,000km) and - by and large - they get that even on their high performance tires (The RSA's might be considered in this category.)

The RSA is pretty much an OE product line - and that means the car manufacturer has an incredible amount of input into the design - almost to the point where you could say the vehicle manufacturer designed the product.

I can easily imagine that most of the RSA's are designed with good rolling resistance and that means compromised wear and / or traction (I've heard both complaints on RSA's)

I'm sure the Goodyear marketing folks just love trying to set UTQG ratings for tires where the actual UTQG test results vary all over the ballpark. And since the US government doesn't care what you put on the sidewall - so long as you can pass the rating - the "safe" thing to do is put a low value on them - even if you could put a high value on certain sizes - and that's what I think is going on with your RSA's.

So you have to take the UTQG treawear rating with a grain of salt (OK, maybe a whole shaker full!), and you have to realize that any tire's UTQG rating maybe the net result of a marketing program - AND - any tire line that is mostly on OE line is going to have more outliers than a purely replacement market line. These same pressures apply to all tire manufacturers.

So I don't think it is fair to say you CAN'T compare UTQG ratings between manufacturers - AND - I am sure you can't say that you can only compare UTQG rating within a given manufacturer. The problem is much more complex than that.

Hopefully this will help.

Rxmfn7

iTrader: (4)

Ive had the MXs on my FD in 265/35 all around and I loved them, especially for the price. For my S2k though, Im not looking to spend that much. The MXs would be more than $100 more for the set that the "cheaper" tires. I just dont care that much about the S2000..

Josh18_2k

iTrader: (3)

check ebay for tires. there are usually kickass tires on there for super cheap, cuz theyre on clearance or whatever. with ebay prices, treadwear doesnt matter anymore!
i picked up a matched pair of BFG G-Force T/A's for 120 bucks. they list 240 each

Brismo7

iTrader: (2)

i got a pair(2) Bridgestone Potenza's RE050A in 255/40/17 for $70 plus $30 shipped. these list for $283 each. they had a tire life of 60-70% left.