#WornTires

This is TTAC, right? This is the place where we tell people they should learn how to swap out transmissions in their apartment parking lots rather than buy a new car, if I’m not mistaken. We love 11-year-old cars and we love buying used and we hate wasting money.

So I know you’re all going to be thrilled when you hear I spent some time at Michelin’s famous Laurens Proving Grounds in South Carolina last week learning about how tires perform when they are worn, because all of us are driving on worn tires. For real. The minute you drive your car away from the driveway where you mounted and balanced your own tires, your tires are wearing. But I have some wonderful news for you — you’re probably not using your tires long enough. So you could be saving even more money. And isn’t that exciting!

Of course, this assumes that you’re buying good tires to start with. Our good friends at Michelin, who were nice enough to pay for a flight, a night at the Greenville, SC Aloft Hotel, and a pretty good piece of chicken, want to start a dialogue about worn tire performance. I know this because they used the phrase “start a dialogue” at least 20 times over the course of the day. The reason they want all this dialoguing to happen is not only because they feel confident that their tires wear better than their competitors’ tires do, but also because they’d like to see some more standardized testing of worn tires as opposed to new tires.