Originally Posted By: SeventhReign
Originally Posted By: The Critic
Not to rain on the parade, but did you investigate the rolling resistance of these tires, compared to the Defender or the OE tire?
Usually there's a 3-5% penalty in fuel economy, which can add up to hundreds of dollars over the life of the tires.
This is completely untrue. It is actually more like 1/2% - 1%. It has been proven quite a few times that the rolling resistance of "properly inflated" tires is virtually negligible.
I cover rolling resistance of tires on 2 different webpages:
Barry's Tire Tech - Rolling Resistance and Fuel Economy
Barry's Tire Tech - Rolling Resistance 2
Bottomline: There can be considerable difference in tire rolling resistance - and that can affect fuel economy. But this is so very highly dependent on driving conditions.
For example, city driving, with its starting and stopping, results in differences in fuel economy that are hardly measurable, since most of the fuel is used to accelerate the vehicle. But country driving, especially interstate driving, can result in measurable differences between tires, because most of the fuel is used to keep the car rolling against wind resistance and rolling friction (such as tire rolling resistance.)
So both a 1% change and a 5% change are reasonable numbers, depending on the situation.