On Mon, 25 Oct 1999, GS- wrote:
> > http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov./cars/testing/tirerate/utqgs.html
> >
> >
> >
> > Pedro Diaz
> >
>
> Good info Pedro. I assume the higher the wear number the
> better the tires? A little hard to tell without a legend
> of some type.
If you delete the "utqgs.html" part of the URL and go to
http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov./cars/testing/tirerate/, there's
a little more info there you might want to take a look at.
The higher the number, the longer the tire should last. So,
if a tire has a high wear rating, that just might mean
that they're really hard rubber and they might actually suck.
The tires I bought for my 3000GT VR-4 (at $900 per set!!!!)
didn't have a really great wear rating, but boy did they
grip! :-) (You have to sacrifice wear for traction, usually.)
On the other hand, my Firehawk SS-10s have a 400 treadwear
rating I believe, and they grip fairly good.
Generally, a tire that is rated 400 can be expected to last
twice as long as a tire rated 200 or 4 times as long as a tire
rated 100 under identical conditions. That info is given on
the page at the URL above. However, what they don't tell you
is that is only true WITHIN A GIVEN BRAND!! It looks like all
they did was to take the manufacturer's ratings and post them
on the page, rather than doing their own testing. Its still
a decent resource, but a bit misleading if you don't know that.
You see, every manufacturer rates their own tires; it isn't done
by an independent lab somewhere. What this means is that what
Michilin calls a 400 rating tire might be Goodyear's idea of
a 200 rating tire. If that were the case, a 400AA Goodyear
would last twice as long as a 400AA Michilin!! I just
used Goodyear an Michilin as an example, I don't actually
know how each compares, and I'm sure the ratings are
closer than that, but you can see the problem. The treadwear
ratings are only useful when comparing tires from the same
manufacturer. They're practically useless for comparing tires
from different companies. But, they give people a warm fuzzy
feeling inside and I guess that's all that's important. ;-)
-Jon-
.--- stei0302@cs.fredonia.edu ----------------------------------------.
| Jon Steiger * AOPA, DoD, EAA, MP Race Team, NMA, SPA, USUA * RP-SEL |
| '96 Dodge Dakota V8, '96 Suzuki Intruder 1400, '96 Kolb FireFly 447 |
`--------------------------- http://www.cs.fredonia.edu/~stei0302/ ---'
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Jun 20 2003 - 12:18:19 EDT