All weather tire information

bizzle said:

Mine were 5 years old, but the reason they cracked was because I haven't been driving it the past two years. That's the reason the set before them cracked, too. It had been sitting for a few years back then, too. I guess if tires aren't used frequently enough the rubber and chemicals inside start to deteriorate.

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That's probably why they rotted, cracked, on my wife's car, just sitting in the garage

I've always had good luck with uniroyal tiger paws, and riken raptors. Only the ones with good conventional square block tread patterns though, as both do have variations with clickbait garbage tread patterns.

They're a cheap crap tire, but their tread pattern makes sense, with NARROW circumfrential grooves for good steering (there's a reason steering rib tires are a thing) and wider cross grooves that are nearly perpendicular to the bead, for good rotational traction

So many tires I mount lately are having wider and wider circumfrential grooves and narrower and narrower cross grooves. Narrow cross grooves run quiet, but they don't dig to the pavement. Wide circumfrential grooves reduce hydroplaning (which kind of is a problem with the steamroller tires every OEM specs lately) but they reduce the size of the tread blocks, again reducing their bite.

Anything with tread grooves at stupid angles should be avoided, same as directionals which can't be effectively rotated. Tire tread geometry is a pretty simple and intuitive subject where you can take one look at a tire and pretty well guess how they'll run.

Intech said:

I thought that my wife's Yokos seemed to dry rot faster than I had imagined. After she had a stroke, her car, a Cadillac, became a 'garage queen', and when I took it to be inspected, the mechanic pointed it out to me. I was annoyed, but didn't hesitate to replace them, with another set of Yokos. Now, I'll see how long they last

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in my experience michelins seem to rot faster than anything else we sell, but we only really sell...
coopers,
michelins,
bridgestone blizzaks,
continentals (mostly on wierder fitments like higher end european cars use),
firestone transforce, and
uniroyals to the few that specifically request them
used to sell more nokians, but less of them lately as supply is out of north dakota most times

but I see almost no yokohamas, not even encountering very many of them secondhand and I do scavenge thrown away takeoffs from the pile.

I have always tried to pick the optimum setup for our cars, and for a while ran Yok S Drives on the MkIV wagon, the V70 and the B6 Passat. Where that got to be a pain was their dangerous cold weather performance if we didn't get the Bilzzaks (WS80 now) installed on time. Since we seem to just put miles on those cars now, instead of beating the crap out of them playing boy (and girl) racer, I have switched them to Advan Sport A/S. Yes, lose a little bit in stick, but as I said, these are actually touring cars so I figure the extra tread life (even S Drives didn't wear badly) and mostly lack of seasonal criticality makes them worthwhile. I have no idea what I will do for XLs on Q7 when need to replace.

Not a blanket condemnation: but the only tire I ever had on the Jetta that was a bunch of trouble were some sticky Michelins (a model they only sold for a short time....gee, wonder why?) that were a PITA in the warranty side. Since then all Yok and happy camper.

I run LT Bridgestones on all of my light trucks, Michelin on class 4 and 5, and Kumho on class 8. On medium duty trailers, have tried several 14 and 16 ply tires, and of all, by far the best have been Sailun (Chinese) - easily outshining Goodyear 614s in every way. On 12k axles where I am responsible for warranty, I have gone to a Yok RY-023 and love them.

I guess what I am trying to express is that you can't simply say all 'XX" tires good and all "YY" tires bad. Each company has a mix of great, good, fair, bad and frigging awful tires for each specific application. You need to do a lot of looking around to collect the information of what really IS good/better/best (tire rack and other owner surveys one good source). Even premium $$ brand name is not always best (as I have found with 235-85 16G).