Why Rotate Your Tires?

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We are always told to rotate our tires from front to rear in order to maintain even tread depth. I understand that this can be important on AWD vehicles where even tread depth between the two axles is important for proper AWD system operation.

For those of us who drive FWD or RWD vehicles, that isn't a concern. On FWD or RWD vehicles, whenever you replace two tires, it is recommended that you install the new tires in the rear. There's good reason for this, as we all know that it's better to have a loss of traction in the front as you can correct it, whereas on the rear, you'll just slide.

With that mentality, shouldn't you always keep your best tires on the rear axle? If that's the case, why do we rotate our tires from front to rear? Wouldn't it make more sense to just allow the front tires to wear down, then install two new ones in the rear (moving the rears to the front), and repeat this cycle?

Please enlighten me.

Thanks.
 
my father always told me never to rotate. he never did. replaced tyres as needed.

so here comes little johnny who learnt everything on the internet, and goes and rotates his tyres. car wobbles like [censored] after that. replaced the fronts (which used to be the rears) and problem was solved.

I don't have an answer for you. something about your suggestion doesn't sit right. my rears in my FWD car carry very little weight. the fronts carry a lot of weight and do the pulling and turning. hard to say!
 
Originally Posted By: Onmo'Eegusee
If I dont rotate I will have a bald left rear in short order (comparatively)....

If you do not have directional tires, you could rotate the tires from side-to-side, just not from front-to-rear.

That's actually something that Michelin's tech line suggested to me.
 
Originally Posted By: crinkles


I don't have an answer for you. something about your suggestion doesn't sit right. my rears in my FWD car carry very little weight. the fronts carry a lot of weight and do the pulling and turning. hard to say!


It's not real obvious, but if the rears lose traction before the fronts in a hard stop, the rear tends to come around and you lose it.
 
Every tire position (e.g. RF/LF/RR/LR) on a vehicle (may) wear the tire differently. The idea is to rotate a tire in all positions so the different wear patterns occur across all tires. This ensures that all tires have the same traction/handling characteristics and helps promote longer tire life through more even tread wear.
 
Originally Posted By: coolhunting
Every tire position (e.g. RF/LF/RR/LR) on a vehicle (may) wear the tire differently. The idea is to rotate a tire in all positions so the different wear patterns occur across all tires. This ensures that all tires have the same traction/handling characteristics and helps promote longer tire life through more even tread wear.


Allow me take this a step further:

Whgen you rotate, the parts of the tire that didn't wear as much will wear a little faster and the parts of the tire that wore faster will wear more slowly. The net effect is the tire delivers more miles - not to mention the end result is an evenly worn tire.

If done correctly and often enough, the difference is tread depth between rotations is small enough to be considered the same - which means no change in the handling (which is why they say put the best tires on the rear.)
 
Originally Posted By: XS650
Originally Posted By: crinkles


I don't have an answer for you. something about your suggestion doesn't sit right. my rears in my FWD car carry very little weight. the fronts carry a lot of weight and do the pulling and turning. hard to say!


It's not real obvious, but if the rears lose traction before the fronts in a hard stop, the rear tends to come around and you lose it.



for a FWD car in a straight line

the decelerating force is a function of the friction co-efficient and downforce. At maximum deceleration, at the point of skidding, the product of the friction co-efficient and downforce is a constant (i.e. the max decelerating force)

Assume all tyres are generating the same friction coefficient between the bitumen and rubber. then, the front tyres would be the most utilised due to higher downforce (as a result of loadings (=empty trunk, engine weight, and inertia forces), and closer to skidding. always. in a straight line stop, the fronts would skid first.

you would need to carry a very heavy load in the trunk to overcome the difference between inertia forces onto the front wheels combined with the engine weight.

if the friction co-efficient at the back is somehow lower, due to ice, etc, or the back gets thrown out by panic steering, then yes, the back could come out.

I don't know. I've always preferred the better tyres on the front of a FWD car.

just trying to tease it out logically
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i have only ever once had the back come out on me on a bad dirt road in the wet.

edit - in a car with ABS it could all be a moot point but that is a while other debate...
 
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However....if you have to pay $20-25 for a rotation and you rotate every 6-8000 miles, in 40,000 miles you could spend $125-$150 or so for rotations. If your tires wear out 5000 miles sooner, you still save money overall. Just a thought.
 
Originally Posted By: The Critic
We are always told to rotate our tires from front to rear in order to maintain even tread depth. I understand that this can be important on AWD vehicles where even tread depth between the two axles is important for proper AWD system operation.

Actually, if anything, AWD cars (those with permanent torque split between front/rear) wear out their tires more evenly than FWD/RWD, so there is even less need for rotation. My previous A4 was like that. Besides, slight tread depth variation isn't enough to mess up most AWD systems.

As for rotation on RWD, BMW advises against rotation. They claim that the handling characteristics will be negatively affected after rotation since each tire has a different wear pattern. Especially the rears - the inner tread wears out quicker because most BMWs call for negative rear camber setup. So, they basically want you to wear out the rears and then replace those two.
 
I rotate only when I have to, which is usually once during the life of the tires. Once I neglected to rotate the tires on my sister's Omni. The rear tires lasted 100K and had horrible dry rot on them.
 
I'll go with a practical reason for regular rotation. By rotating my tires every 5k miles, I have even enough wear that I will have to replace all 4 tires at once. Many tire shops offer deals on the purchase fo 4 tires, not 2. I got $60 off 4 BF Goodrich Traction T/A's for my Saturn and $80 off 4 Michelin Pilot Exaltos for my Taurus. If I wore the fronts to nothing and bought 2 new ones, I would have paid $15 and $20 more per tire respectively. BTW, Costco will rotate and re-balance your tires every 5K miles if you bought them there.

That being said, I still find I get much closer to the warranty mileage with regular rotation than people I know who don't rotate. The fleet manager at my old job once called me to ask why I always had one set fewer tires purchased over the life of my company cars than everyone else. We all drove the same cars and all cars were retired at 80K miles. The answer is that I rotated my tires and no one else did.
 
Originally Posted By: pottymouth
The fleet manager at my old job once called me to ask why I always had one set fewer tires purchased over the life of my company cars than everyone else. We all drove the same cars and all cars were retired at 80K miles. The answer is that I rotated my tires and no one else did.


One fewer set to 80K? How many sets of tires does that take?

My fingers say 2 (the OE set and one good replacement set). You had co-workers that needed 3 sets of tires just to get to 80k?
 
I rotate my tires at home at every 6,000 miles at alternating oil changes. The only time a shop rotates for me is if I have the tires balanced. I bought a lifetime balance and rotation policy for a few bucks extra per tire. It saves me money if I have a vibration problem and need the tires balanced. If all my truck needs is rotation, I enjoy doing it myself and it saves me a trip to the tire store. Plus I can clean, adjust and inspect my brakes, check the suspension parts, etc while I'm at it.

Rotating my tires definitely makes them wear more evenly and last longer.
 
I rotate my Michelin LTX's on my Silverado every oil change.

Never had to have them rebalanced though.
 
Originally Posted By: mrsilv04
You had co-workers that needed 3 sets of tires just to get to 80k?

Not that surprising, IMO. I'd be lucky to get 80k out of 3 sets. I usually get 20-25k out of a set. It just depends on the type of tires, the load under which they're working, and the driving patterns.
 
I rotate for seasons, to get good tread up front in winter. Often in summer, I'll wear out a pair of tires on beat front so I can toss them sooner. I don't have time for a full length post, but I believe a tire is in it's lowest wear mode after it's run-in on a certian corner. Change it's position, and it has to re-bed...accelerating wear. Gotta go.
 
I wear tires very slowly. I rotate with seasons too, as I have snow tires in the mix.

I never wear tires, I get 50-100k per set, and UV rotting gets them first.

I also never replace two tires - I demand a new set of four matched tires... they all wear well enough to be done at more or less the same time.
 
Had a taurus with massive negative rear camber, the tire had 2/32 on the inside and 8/32 on the out. Previous owner never rotated. Car handled great, Ford must have set it up to shred tires to hold the road better. Truly "fixing" this would have required unmounting tires from their rims and putting them back on inside-out, which would have handled horribly if they were left to go too long in one position.

Co-worker had incredible feathering on his sunfire rear tires, I assume the car was sensitive to this after reading similar about other j-bodys here. He had diamond-shaped, well, parallellogram shaped tread blocks and the leading edge vs trailing edge had very different wear patterns. Rotating these up front would have led to noise for a few hundred miles while resetting the wear.
 
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