Low rolling resitance tires - how long will they last?

Wow! I only have 19K miles and I doubt if I'll get another 5K out of them. Mostly city driving.

Heat is the enemy of tires and it comes from:

1) lower rather than higher inflation 2) wheel alignment, closer to less toe and less camber reduces wear

Some folks prefer the handling with softer tires, more toe and camber.

Bob Wilson

If yours is a 2007 with this mileage, you probably do a lot of highway driving. Not a lot of braking and hard cornering - combined with correct tire pressure and not extreme temperatures, this sounds like heaven for tires. If you'd subject the same tire to city driving, hot weather, and maybe less regular pressure checks, it'd be gone in half the distance.

Toyota doesn't manufacture tires. The brand of tire currently on your car can be sourced at different dealers, and there's a number of tires in the same size available from other brands. See a tire dealer.

cu .\\arc

Hi Marc, You got it exactly right - it's about 75% or so highway in a mild PA climate. As far as braking - I use the "B" mode whenever possible instead.

About the brand - laugh all you want but it was for the first time today I cared to look at the brand of the tire (after owning the car for 14 months). And I do check and correct pressure every two months of just about and so I must have seen it, just never registered in the brain :-) So, yes, mine are Goodyear Integrity tires, seem like a solid product to me now.

Thanks again, D~

This is ma' sig

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I'm not quite convinced B saves much of anything vs soft braking (which the Prius does electrically anyway) - but then you've obviously done nothing wrong, considering your mileage.

Tires are one big compromise, between wear, roadholding, noise, wet performance, comfort, price, temperature range and other factors. If you're happy with what you've got, you know what to buy in a year or so, right? :-)

cu .\\arc

How does he know, if he's always used B?

B keeps the engine in the loop as an air pump. Shouldn't be running spark and fuel, though, but still--using it as an air pump like that to slow down is causing wear that it isn't designed to get on an ongoing basis.

The brake pedal engages the generators to slow the car down, which is what it's designed to do.

fuelzilla there is the perfect example of "that's how my daddy taught me to do it" and how things pass from generation to generation. He's doing something not out of reading and proper training, but out of "it just seems like it should be the thing to do"--and apparently he's convinced now it's the PROPER thing to do, despite the facts.

'B' mode isn't a good choice for braking. When you step on the brake, the Prius will first use the electric motors as generators to provide resistance and recharge the HV batteries. The mechanical brakes will only come on either below 7 mph (when the EMs can no longer provide useful resistance) or when you need to stop quicker than the EMs will allow.

The purpose of 'B' mode is when you're descending a long hill, because once the recovered energy has brought the batteries to their upper charge limit, the car will start using the mechanical brakes to prevent overcharging. When in 'B' mode, in addition to using the EMs for resistance, it also keeps the ICE spinning, since even though it's not providing power, it is acting like a big air pump, helping to dissipate some of the energy without the mechanical brakes. Since the Prius mechanical brakes are smaller than most cars that size (due to the fact that they're not responsible for 100% of the braking work), they are likely to overheat on a long downhill run. It's not much different from when truck use a lower gear on a long downgrade.

In theory you're not using any gas in 'B' mode, though my ScangaugeII says differently. It usually reads in the 150-250 MPG range, though I don't know if the engine really is consuming a small amount of fuel, or if the Scangauge is just confused, since the engine is spinning.

Bottom line: Using 'B' mode for normal braking and slowing isn't allowing the Prius to run at its maximum efficiency. If you want to read more, there's a good write-up here:

I was only looking at tire wear as claimed by him, and found it to be remarkably low - so he hasn't done anything wrong that would eat his tires. And I can't see that B would put more load on the tires than soft electric only braking.

It'll probably spark, to make absolutely sure no unburnt fuel goes to the cat; even in case there were a dripping injector or something. But then, having the engine pump air is not going to wear it any more than if it were to do so in a conventional car.

Prius got out of the realm of the geeks. Normal people drive them now, as well :)

cu .\\arc

Ah, but the Prius isn't a conventional car, and wasn't designed to operate like a conventional car.

It wasn't designed to live in B. I'm sure Toyota's engineers would have something to say about that.

"Marc Gerges" ...

It does not spark, it just spins. Here is a pretty good explanation of B Mode:

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