Unsafe tires.

Tires have date codes on them, yet totally indecipherable to the average customer in a tire store.

And even recalling and replacing all those tires is a drop in the bucket nationally: Most vehicles on the road have either too much or too little air in the tires, some vehicles have both!

Yeah, it's almost entirely Bullcrap. The tires are failing from underinflation, not "age". The tire industry keeps promoting this lie to sell more tires.

dry rot can cause a tire failure, I experienced it first hand when I was teen. Before it was a thing to be paranoid about everything. A tire went flat. It was dry rotted and just gave up. Not dramatically, I just heard the air hissing out at a stop light. Then I found the spare had tread separated in the trunk from dry rot, but still holding air. It thumped but allowed the car to hobble to a parking lot. So basically it's just annoying. Especially in a country that doesn't allow for civilized speeds over 99+% of it. At high speed it might be an issue.

Would I be happy about being sold a set of NOS tires when I thought they were new? Yes. Because if it's a car I'm not driving a lot I lose life on the tires.

Brent: NOS?

NOS = New Old Stock, or new inventory that had sat around but had never been sold.

The Caddy dealer sold my mom a set of NOS Bridgestone tires at premium tire prices before she gave me the car. When they developed tread bubbles within the dealer referred me to the official Bridgestone dealer, who told me they were obsolete when the were purchased. The Bridgestone shop replaced them at no charge, but it really wasn't their problem.

Bewley Allen in Alhambra is now out of business. They offered her a pittance as a trade-in on her new car so she gave it to me instead; I KNOW they didn't offer her much because they knew exactly how shitty their quarterly service (which she always had them do) was.

I wish it were possible for them to rot in hell.

NOS = New Old Stock, or new inventory that had sat around but had never been sold. "

THANK YOU!

New Old Stocks(no I will not abbreviate that!) should be against the law, given what I've read on here.

Nothing is 100%. I had a set of Pirellis and two of the 4 failed on the freeway, at about one month apart, at 22K and 3 years of age. I didn't wait for the other two to fail.... They always had proper tire pressure. I've got 14 year old, 65K tires on another vehicle and so far they have not failed.

I have Kumho tires on my 1983 Dodge van. I bought them about five years ago. I put about 240 miles on my van each year. I reckon those tires will start to dry rot long before I wear the tread out.

Ashton Crusher: How did you determine "proper" tire pressure.

I had a Pirelli and a Dunlop (no idea what brand the tubes were, I never had to change/fix them) on my motorcycle which sat unused in a shed for perhaps 10 years. When I wheeled it out to give it away they both still had air.

Dunlop used to make tires out of "cling" rubber. What's that called now?

At least as high as the placard on the door and no higher then the max listed on the sidewall. Depending on how you plan to drive and what you plan to carry you can pick something between those numbers if you want to fine tune things. You can go crazy and measure temperatures across the surface of the tire and/or put chalk on it. Some say you can safely go 5 over the max listed and improve handling. I'm not convinced.

Ashton Crusher wrote: "At least as high as the placard on the door and no higher then the max listed on the sidewall. Depending on how you plan to drive and what "

Someone found the DOOR PLACARD! That's all I was looking for. I posted last month a thread about a NHTSA Survey where they found most people go by the numbers on the tires themselves, and the door placard the least. Got next to no attention.

Yeah, I go a couple PSI over the door sticker myself - good blend of handling and fuel economy. Now when you mentioned some people going 5 PSI over the max, did you mean over the number on the TIRE? Yikes!

The Kumho tires on my 1983 Dodge van say 41 pounds. That is how much PSI I put in the tires.

JR: Again - tires are the wrong place to look - but you are hardly alone in this error.

Scroll down in this link:

Recommended pressures vary by expected maximum load you intend to carry. In the table in that link the maximum recommended pressures don't even come close to the max stamped on the tires.

If a vehicle I'm driving does not have a placard on the b-pillar, and the info is not in the manual or anywhere else, I'll inflate to 5lbs psi below what's on the tire, until I can find out the VEH MFG's recommended pressure.

Yes. Someone posted the results of testing that showed high pressures like that resulted in the best handling. I'm not doing it but I feel it would be OK to do so based on the theory that the tires surely are designed to handle a 5 psi over inflation. Heck, the Joe Chitwood's of the world pump them up to something like 100 psi to do their stunts.

My uncle always said that you can't fill a tire too much, that you should just pump and pump and when no more air is going into the tire that it's time to stop. He didn't believe in pressure gauges or measurements.

Surprisingly enough, he died at home in bed, and not in some terrible blowout-induced accident.

--scott

I don't know about that, but I pump the tires on my MTB up to 80 lbs if I have that much energy, otherwise 60 or so. I think '40' is molded into the tire as the maximum pressure.

People always say stuff like "He died doing what he loved." Let's hope so.