I’m not proud to admit it, but that is pretty close to how my tires were last week. I finally swapped them out, but even with my employee discount i was looking at almost $700 for a set of four. Tires are expensive, and you often dont realize how bad they have gotten until it is too late. Even finding used tires is difficult these days.
That being said, going from exposed wires to fresh tires is amazing. I got in my car and immediately noticed i was sitting 3 inches higher, and it’s wonderful driving a car that actually grips the road instead of just sitting on top of them.
700$!? Where are you located that tires are this expensive? Here in Austria they are between 40€-80€ per 1 tire.
A new set of 4 tires plus alignment for my compact crossover is about $900-930 in the US.
Smaller tires cost less and xovers usually need 4 tires if there’s a certain thread difference. My mazda 3 cost 600 for 16" Michelin crossclimate2, which are considered good tires and also up there in price.
You can have your alignment checked before getting the alignment. Often you won’t need one. Every time I’ve checked everything was perfectly fine still.
I paid $700 2 years ago for tires for my SUV. SUV tires are a bit more expensive - but they’re still not cheap for sedans. I’m in the USA.
Lol. Why pay extra for an SUV? It’s like throwing money away. You can easily get sedan tires under $100.
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They are usually larger. SUV tyres are at least R17 (or R19 if you’re super fancy) while sedan tyres are between R14 and R16.
I sold the SUV a few months later, lol. I drive a hatch now.
Just did this too mine were $600 for my car. They weren’t even top grade tires or anything crazy. Live in u.s. Midwest
I still have no idea how I got 4 tires for about $180 in the Midwest a few years ago
For a second I imagined the shopping cart wheels (with the one that is bad) on a car.
Well he was suddenly 3 inches higher. So probably a big car/something with big tires. Almost Everything is more expensive on bigger cars.
Thinking more about it, what brand tires di you buy? Chinese firms have been flooding the market with cheap tires to undercut domestic union made tires in America and Europe.
40 Euro for a tire? Is that stolen and/or used?
I’m in Ohio and drive a Subaru Crosstrek. 255/17/55 tires arent cheap. I could have gotten discount tires somewhere, but i work at a union tire plant and so i got the premium tires that i make for a living.
My car has AWD and 35 profile ties. It’s at least 1200USD for anything that doesn’t suck because I have to change all four at the same time.
How did you passed the inspection with these tires?! or is it damaged within one year?
In the US most states don’t care in California (where I live) as long as it has a cat and passes emissions your good
I only just got the car 6 months ago, but Ohio doesn’t have annual inspections
I get used tires for around $30-$40 per tire. Between $150 and $200 gets a full set with installation. They last me a few years from there, driving around 8,000 miles per year. They don’t match, but I don’t care.
They’re slicks, just like race cars use! That must mean they’re super grippy, right?
Yes, until it rains.
No, this isn’t the grippy layer. The grippy stuf is long gone.
Drive a little more and you’ll have METAL tires which are the BEST!
And sparkly ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
Trains have metal wheels and are efficient. You can also be efficient by having metal tires on your car. You’re welcome, FuckCars.
Once that layer is worn down, the extra grip metal braid will be exposed, and the car will have super traction.
For all those wandering if these are slick (racing) tires, it doesn’t look like it. You can clearly see the grooves worn out (bottom left) and the threads through the rubber on the left, indicating extremely worn out tires. I’m curious though as to how anyone would get their tires in this shape before a safety inspection would have made it mandatory to change them.
Many states (and presumably many countries) done have safety inspections. In the Midwest there are tons of old vehicles that would never pass an inspection out on the road
Is that because regulations are for commies, or there’s some Big Road Traffic Accident lobby profiting off people dying in shitboxes? What possible reason is there to allow such an obvious death trap on the road?
There’s a combination of anti-regulation sentiments and poverty. Rural towns in particular have a lot of old ass beaters driving around and people don’t have the income to fix or replace those vehicles. But yeah, that’s also where you get a lot of the “gub’ment can take it from my cold dead hands” types of attitudes, even (especially?) when it’s for the safety and well-being of people. Hell people fought restaurant smoking laws up until the early 2010’s, and some states still have no helmet law for motorcycles.
Wondering**
I had a motorcycle shop tell me they were saving my tires because they’d never seen anything so overcooked. What can I say, I could barely afford the bike. It isn’t running now because I can’t afford to fix it. This economy is fucking terrible.
Racing slicks at home:
I didn’t know a tire could be so smooth it casts a reflection. This must the maximum smoothnes possible.
Combine with brakes worn down to the calipers on rotors directly and you’re facing the final boss on hard mode for the prize of life
You’re sliding all the way to god on those bad boys
Just put them in tire warmers every morning for 20 minutes. That’ll do.
Isn’t this pretty much optimal on dry surfaces? The patterns in the tires are for draining away water, and nothing else. I mean, look at F1 tires for dry roads.
But the tiniest splash of water will send you on a rotational journy into what’s straight ahead.
And those tires are wet in the picture, so it’s amazing they’re still alive.
This is just driving on hard mode.
/s no don’t do this, this is so dangerous.
Does police or yearly car inspection prior to registration not check for these? Here we need to have winter set and summer set of tires, plus that all gets checked regularly and you can’t register your car if it doesn’t pass technical exam.
Most everywhere here in the States has stopped doing any form of yearly vehicle examination, and the police in most places won’t pull you over for anything relating to vehicle issues unless it’s either seriously egregious or they have nothing better to do (sometimes not even then, like my local PD, who has been doing effectively nothing for the past 3 years ever since a police reform law was talked about.)
Most everywhere here in the States has stopped doing any form of yearly vehicle examination
Is this true? We have annual inspections in Pennsylvania.
It is. Only 15 states have a periodic inspection.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_inspection_in_the_United_States
Kentucky is laughable. It’s literally only “inspected” if you bought the car from out of state, and the inspection was $15, and a sheriff comes out tells you to step on the brakes and turn your headlights and emergency lights on. You need 1 working headlight, any one working tail light, (yes you’ll pass with just that tiny one in the center of your rear window,) and any two indicator lights to pass. The guy that did mine kicked my tires and said, “yep, it’s a car.”
For $15? I’d expect a little dance or something as well, that doesn’t seem like a good value for your money.
Here in Maryland, my car, that I bought new in 1999, has technically never needed a safety inspection. Emissions every two years, but no safety. Isn’t that a fun thought? If I were to sell it, it would need to be inspected then (and it’s a pretty thorough inspection), but otherwise…nah.
I keep it in better condition and would never let the tires get to this point. A few months ago, I replaced a set of tires because they had aged out, and even that was longer than I usually like to keep them. But not everyone has the money or inclination (or insanity) to keep a car that old in good condition.
But, statistically, there’s little evidence that safety inspections reduce crashes which kind of makes you wonder whether it’s really worth it. It’s one of those things that seems logical, but the statistics may not bear that out. At most, it’s only a small improvement, not a drastic difference.
I haven’t had an inspection in over twenty years.
Oh wow. I could understand them not caring if only your own life was at stake, but it’s not. Here we had people try to go around the inspection process, but now all the places that do these inspections (privately owned by the way) have to have live camera feeds of the vehicle from different angles and submit photos and graphs of the vehicle status before being able to issue a sticker.
And here I am complaining about someone’s light not being tuned properly while people drive with this kind of tires.
Probably living paycheck to paycheck or on the tail end of a delivery driver career as you find out that car maintenance is not free.
Not an excuse if other people can lose lives. There are used tires, cheaper tires, public transport, car pooling, etc.
One person’s unacceptable excuse is another’s meager existence. I’m not saying it’s right, just calling out how it gets there.
How the fuck do the tires even pick up the road at that point 😂
Driving on the free way?? Christ on a bike
Cars on race tracks use bald tyres for more contact with the road, which gives better grip. The tread is there to guide water out so the car doesn’t slide in the wet.
Unfortunately it looks like the image is of a car with bald tyres in the wet (I’m assuming that’s why it’s shiny).
I think the car might have been parked overnight because it looks like there’s a layer of ice coating the tire. Talk about hard mode, now every street is an ice level!
Also worth noting though that the main reason race cars are able to get more grip with slick tires is because the tires are made to have a very low melting (?) point. So they heat up very quickly and also don’t last very long as a result. But that heating up allows them to literally stick to the ground. Normal car tires ain’t doing that for sure.
Man I just went down a rabbit hole and no one can agree on car tyres. It seems you’re right about special racing tyres that melt and attach to the road (after warm up laps), but no one can agree on whether bald car tyres in the dry have more grip than treaded ones (in ideal conditions). For sure, wet, snow, sand, gravel, etc. You want the tread, which is pretty much every public road since they are not swept perfectly clean and smooth. But I could not find an answer to whether bald tyres grip the road better. People say they don’t, which is why racing cars use slicks, but that’s not proof, even if bald tyres grip better they would still use soft tyres for even better grip.
I found reddit threads with engineers saying one thing and other engineers saying they are wrong. Racing forums with non-engineers saying the soft slicks are the reason for grip and bald regular car tyres have less grip. No one can back up their claims.
It’s obvious that it’s a bad idea to drive on bald tyres because the road is always an imperfect surface, but I can’t even find a hypothetical answer to the question with any confidence.
Welcome to cars. Combination of advice that’s valid, advice that used to be valid but isn’t anymore, and advice that was never valid. Very few ways to verify anything, because the knowledge is held by manufacturers and racing teams who have reasons to keep secrets.
I ended up here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tire_model
In current vehicle simulator models, the tire model is the weakest and most difficult part to simulate
I guess we don’t really know the answer, that would explain why it’s so hard to find 😆
We’re also looking for a very generic answer to a (probably) more nuanced problem
Using f1 as an example (Because every series will use a different tyre) across the five different compounds used 100-110°c seems to be the range for optimal grip.
If you could get a normal road tyre to that temp it would just fall apart.
Oooo learn somethin new every day, thanks for sharing your knowledge ❤️
The knobs on tires are so that water has a way to escape when a car drives over it. A completely flat Tyre has the most traction but can’t handle rain. Every day Tires have a mix to handle all conditions. I may be wrong but I remember hearing this in a youtube video
That’s basically correct. One caveat is that manufactures often put gripper material on the outside, while the inside is meant only as a base and doesn’t have much grip. You can’t make DIY racing slicks just by sanding down normal tires. Maybe you could back when the World’s Fastest Indian guy did it, but not now.
