Tyre Brands - Price vs Quality?
 

HI All,

I'm getting new tyres (replacing Pirelli). The same are working out about 200 a corner. Looking at the brands, there's a chunky enough price difference between premium:

Bridgestone/Continential/Dunlop/Goodyear/Michelin/Pirelli

and Medium Class:

Falken/Fulda/Hankook/Uniroyal/Vredestein.

Given I do about 3k miles per year, and dont really want to cough up nearly 1k to change all, does anyone have any views on what way to go?

Realise a lot is down to personal preference, budget etc..but also safety and longevity of the tyre is important too...

Interested in any views.

Many thanks

I tend to get Korean (South) ones these days. While 30 years ago they couldn't even make toilet paper they have become a first world country. Hankook are OE fit on many VAG cars, even PORSCHES and I find them as good as the premium brands some of which have some really terrible tyres on offer. I have EU CAA rated NEXEN N'fera SU1s at the moment they are factory fitted to the Genesis G80 and I find them really good.

I am on my 2nd set of Hankook Ventus, far better than Goodyear Eagle F1 in terms of mileage, no noticeable difference in grip/handling or noise.
Online can be well cheaper if you can wait a week or so for shipping.

Part worns?
 

For me - as posted elsewhere before - getting 1st class (i.e. Michelin/Contis/Pirellis only..) partworns from a reliable source are the answer to avoiding paying over the odds for tyres.

Saving more than £5k on this over 3 or 4 years, while covering around 100k in that time, and getting 1st class handling with zero quality or safety issues speaks for itself for me.

I have mostly been using premium second had tyres. Michelin are definitely my favourites. Anything else I tried from premium are fine while fresh but as they get 3-5 years old the become hard and loose grip quite a lot.

Not really much experience with medium range, I have had couple that come with the car and normally old age and not much grip same as old premium.

Cheap ones I only bought new, they are OK while knew but wears out soon so no experience long term.

I now put Three A P606 on A6. So far so good, feel better than Continental I had on before, done about 1500 miles in 3 weeks good mix of all kinds of roads, mostly hard driving. So far does not seem to have excessive wear but too early to say.

Michelin every time where available.

Unlike others, I wouldn't touch part worns, not for the only small patch of rubber between you and the road.

I'd also be put off by budget tyres if I was looking to buy a car, tells me the car has probably had corners cut in its maintenance

Michelins have been the preference on the last 4 cars I've owned - they've generally come with something else fitted and I have tried Goodyear, Dunlop and Continental in the past. It's so vehicle specific in terms of how well they work that I now tend to go with Michelins by default. Given tyres for me are something I buy every 2-3 years, at least, I don't want to make a 'mistake' and find I don't like what I have paid good money for.

The S5 came with Contis at 2 years old (they were actually older than the car, so think were part worns put on to sell the car) and they tramlined dreadfully. Similar experience on our C5 A6 when I fitted them new - they also wore out in half the time of the Goodyears that were on it before with noticeable edge wear that rendered them illegal well before the centre tread was below 4mm! Alignment was spot on.

We rotate winters on the S5, so the summer Michelin Super Sport 20s still have 5.5mm tread all round and are wearing evenly and still grip brilliantly, despite being 4.5 years old. I don't monitor mileage between tyres, but we do 7-8k a year in it, with plenty of town work which kills the Contis.

I'm about to finally wear out the pair of Bridgestones that were fitted to our 2015 Golf at the factory, having swapped them off the back. Put Michelin Pilot Sport 4 on the back, which will get rotated to the front, and a new pair of PS4 on the back. They are so much better in terms of noise and grip it's just silly, as the price difference isn't that marked.

I had no choice but to run part worns 25 years ago, and had a few close shaves with bulges in sidewalls and dodgy puncture repairs. Not a massive issue on a 1969 Cortina that struggled to top 80mph. The industry isn't properly regulated so standards vary massively across the country - for instance tyres shouldn't be stacked when stored, but 99% of part worn dealers I've visited do precisely that! There's a voluntary code of conduct for part worn dealers, that was written when I was involved in tyre regulation, but it never got off the ground as far as I'm aware as the industry had to change tack to fight off efforts by the waste regulators to class all part worn tyres as waste, which meant storage limits and fire prevention equipment on a massive scale. Not sure where it had got to now. Basically if you are fortunate enough to live near a part worn dealer with a good track record of not being taken to court by Trading Standards and supplying properly inspected product, not an issue. After all, every tyre in use is 'part worn' so I don't buy into the hysteria the new tyre suppliers try to push that part worn = automatically bad.

On premium vs mid-range, I tend to find the price difference doesn't balance the performance and longevity to the point I'm prepared to gamble on them being any good over a period of years of use.

Why not? I do the same...

Is it any different if they are mounted to wheels?

I'm the same. I'd skimp on food (if I had to) before I'd skimp on tyres. I always buy the best tyres available (with the emphasis on wet/dry stopping distance) and I replace both sets (summer/winter) every 2-3 years, or when the tread depth gets to about 5-6mm.

In everyday driving, cheap or worn tyres might feel comparable to new high-end tyres but if you need to take evasive action some day to avoid an accident, they're simply not going to provide equal performance. The difference in grip and stopping distances might equate to just a few metres, which will be practically unnoticeable in normal driving conditions, but when you need to take action to avoid an accident, every metre counts. I've had some very near-misses in my decades of driving and, on more than one occasion, just a minor difference in grip or stopping distance would certainly have resulted in a collision.

Admittedly, in my youth I did put budget tyres and part-worns on my old bangers, but those were different times, and the cars were so appallingly bad (by modern standards) that the tyres were the least of my worries. Something I do remember about those days of driving on part worn tyres (2mm-5mm) was how often they got punctures. I rarely ever get punctures now. It seems that a greater tread depth is less prone to picking up nails, which is another reason I prefer to change my tyres early.

It depends on the volume - a pile of 4 won't be a problem, in practice, whether mounted or unmounted. A pile of unmounted over 1.6m high is a bad idea from a manual handling point of view, at the very least. They're designed to take load vertically (in the main) so by the time you've created a large pile, the ones at the bottom have quite a significant load being placed on the sidewalls, plus there's a risk of injury from the whole lot toppling over. If fitted to wheels you wouldn't want to go anywhere near that height, although the wheel and air pressure will reduce the likelihood of tyre damage.

It's been a number of years since I was involved with the tyre trade industry bodies that were working on best practice guidance, but for storage it basically recommends storing part worns for sale in the same way new tyres are stored (ie in racks, sitting on the tread)

This is for commercial retail, don't forget, rather than what you do as an individual storing your own stuff. I have a pile of 4 wheels stacked on top of each other. I just inflate them to a fairly high pressure before storing long term.