Tire Rotation

I don't think it is a black and white issue. Certainly you can equalize tire wear a bit and potentially extend tire life, but on the downside, it provides an excellent opportunity for ham-fisted mechanics with air impact tools to overtighten your lug nuts, at best making them darn hard to get off if you should have a flat, and at worst, warping brake rotors.

I've found that on a FWD car, the fronts will often wear out twice as fast as the rears. So if you decide not to rotate, then you can employ a strategy where you replace the fronts at half the rear's mileage. And if you have a full-size spare, then you can use the spare for one of the new fronts. If your rears go a typical 50K miles, this means you only have to buy a single new tire in the first 50K miles of ownership.

I don't rotate, but to me it is a six vs. half-dozen issue. If the rotation was a separate charge item, I wouldn't bother - I don't think you can pencil it out to have the tire wear savings possibly be as much as spending $20 every 5K miles.

- Mark

I rotate, once or twice a year depending on the car and mileage. I figure over the long haul it can't hurt.

I have found through experience that tread life is not the most important issue with tire rotation. Noise is. As a tire is left in position on the car, the tire tread blocks will develop wear patterns that increase the tire's tread noise. I've taken to cross rotating tires. The tires are consistently quiet for the long run. It used to be that cross rotation was bad, does not seem to be the case any more. Anybody have similar experiences?

It's fine as long as the tires are not directional. If the car came with directional tires, then the owner's manual will show that front-back is the only allowed rotation.

- Mark

You can still cross rotate you just have to go through the added expense and time of unmounting and remounting the tires on the crossed wheels. Another issue is that it will look funny if you have whitewalls on one side of your tires.

Douglas

Also another problem with that is that it locks you into buying the same tire type...which may or may not be good.

I agree. If you want to change to a different tire, then this favors rotation as it your best shot of equally wearing out all the tires (including the spare if you have a full-size spare), allowing you to replace all four without throwing away tread.

- Mark

Yes, but the cost and trouble of remounting tires and rebalancing whells far outweighs any possible tread life gains, and who wants to subject their expensive wheels to a tire remounting every 5K? This is asking for trouble.

- Mark

I buy 4 new tires and they will rotate and balance for free every 5000 miles

If the tires are balanced properly the first time and none of the weights have been removed, there should not be need to rebalance.

You fail to take wear into account....it will affect balance.

Well if they are properly inflated, they will wear evenly and still not need a rebalance

If they are not worn properly, then balancing will mask the problem but not fix it. If its an alignment issue, then get the alignment fixed.

Correct. But that is in a theoretical world. I rebalance my tires every 5000 miles. And they always need it by then. Tires wear and the balance changes as a result.

Stephen Clark