New Tire Advice

[Kurb]

I need help deciding on new tires for my Trailblazer. I am looking for an all season or A/T tire with good snow and wet traction along with decent treadwear.

Here is my experience so far:

Michelin XC LT4 - previous owner installed. Great tire but no longer made. Great wet traction and better snow traction. I hardly used the 4 wheel drive in winter and drove through snow that was over 2 ft deep in 4 wheel drive. The tires already had some wear when I bought the TB, and I got another 40K miles before I had to replace them. I would have gotten more if I noticed the bad wheel bearing and ball joint sooner.

Michelin RoadHandler - Similar to the XC LT4 for traction, but a little smoother and more quite ride. I never drove them through deep snow, but I did not really need the 4 wheel drive in light snow. I started to think that the snow traction was just the TB and that the tires did not matter too much. These tires were a bit pricy considering they wore out (evenly) at ~20K miles. This time, I could not blame the wear on any mechanical issues.

Goodyear Armortrac - This tire made me realize that the good traction was the Michelin tires and not just the TB. While I admit this was a lot of fun, but my wife did not share my enthusiasm. It was also a bit embarrassing when the 4 wheel drive broke, and I had to turn around to get out of a parking lot. I only got 35K miles out of these tires.

After doing some research, I was going to go for the LTX M/S until I saw another post on this site about problems with Michelin tires that gave this link: http://www.consumeraffairs.com/tires/michelin.html
Note that it mentions the LTX M/S: one case where it wore out at 10K miles and another case where the tread came off.

My questions are as follows:

1. Is Michelin quality no longer what it used to be?

2. Am I being overly paranoid about a couple cases for the LTX M/S? I imagine that there is some small percentage of all tires that have problems. The 440 treadwear rating does seem pretty low, though.

3. The treadwear that I am getting seems really bad in general compared to other reviews. Is the mileage that I am getting out of tires unreasonable? I do drive on a lot of curvy, hilly roads, and drive a little harder than I should at times.

4. What alternative tires do people recommend for the best wet/snow traction and treadwear?

 

[BlazingTrails]

Pirelli, or nitro? My favs

 

[Paul Bell]

Consumer Reports rated the Michelin Latitude as the best and I have a set being delivered tomorrow. Time will tell how they do.

 

[dmanns67]

Hankook Ventus RH06 on the SS wheels and Cooper Discoverer LSX plus on the stockers. Coopers were awesome in the snow last year.

 

[HARDTRAILZ]

Revo 2

 

[IllogicTC]

I think you're seeing a bit of selection bias. Knowing a bit about the way people in general think, it seems more likely for a random person to negatively rate something which did not perform to expectations, than for a positive rating for one which DOES meet expectations. The likelihood of a positive review being posted by the person increases if the item vastly exceeds expectations. This is why most of the reviews you'll see on 80% of items at Amazon is either "It's worthless junk" or "THIS IS THE BEST THING IN THE WORLD I WOULD HAVE PAID TRIPLE THE PRICE!!!!" with the rare, honest, "it is what it is" review where they don't go full-on hyperbole and give an honest, fair rating that is a more accurate representation of the quality.

They may have had tread peel on one, or something happen to another, but think -- if these people got 4 new tires, one failed. That's a 25% failure rate. But now, that number will be greatly diluted by the number of these tires sold. If one person out of 1000 has a real or apparent problem, that's a 0.1% failure rate, and even then a sometimes people do things which the item was not designed to do, and then blame it on the item for being unable to hold up.

I still believe Michelin is a quality brand. The tread peel may have been a one-off failure, or maybe the tire seller was trying to pass off re-treads as new, people don't look into this stuff, they just assume.

 

[Kurb]

Great point. I looked at the consumer affairs site (linked in original post above) and found that there are similar reports for other tires as well, not just Michelins. The tire rack survey shows the LTX M/S tire with good ratings based on over 88 million miles driven, so the odds appear to be pretty good. There was a recall for this tire, but it only affected a specific size and date of manufacture. I also read that this tire is basically the same as the XC LT4, which was awesome, so I am going to go with the LTX M/S. Thanks.

 

[triz]

I've been running Continental LX20's and while I did not get the reported mileage out of them. I think they are a good tire. Far better than the Bridgestones that came with it. It has excellent traction in the wet and dry. Very quiet tire. I am on my second set. I got them for half the cost of the Michelins originally. When I did not get the right mileage the shop just gave me a new set of tires for about 100+ bucks. These seem to be wearing a lot better than the first set.

 

[IllogicTC]

If you're going to buy, now's the time to do it. There have been tariffs passed that are going to really ramp up the price of tires produced in China, and Michelin has some/all (not sure how much, but I CAN confirm some) manufacturing done over there.

 

[ahabofthepequod]

Replaced my stock Michelins with the Latitude Tour with the White Outline letters. So far they seem to have better traction than the old ones (wet/dry), not noisy seem to ride good too.

 

[Kurb]

The LTX M/S tires failed inspection today. They were excellent tires for wet and winter traction and ride quality throughout their life. The 4WD drive did not work at all this winter (on the list of things to do), but I did not have any trouble getting around with the tires worn, although I only drove on bad roads a couple times since we did not have much of a winter. The tires spun on icy roads going up steep hills, but I did not have any trouble getting where I needed in 2WD.

I only got 22K miles out of the LTX M/S tires, but I could have done better maintaining them. I only rotated and balanced them twice. Although the tires wore pretty evenly, the middle of two of the tires wore down to the indicators while I had about 1/32" more at the edges, so even though I check the tire pressure pretty regularly, I must have driven them over-inflated a little too long. I think I might have gotten another year out of them if it wasn't for the state inspection, though. I was hoping they would pass them any way, but I should have known better.

I was going to buy another set, but Firestone convinced me to buy the Firestone Destination LE-2 tires that they had in stock so that I could get the inspection sticker put on today. They looked like they had good reviews on Tire Rack and on the forums here. With the discount, the complete set was $170 cheaper than the LTX M/S. We'll see how they do.

 

[Bow_Tied]

I hear they are a decent tire and have a good tread warranty.

 

[Sparky]

I really like the Destination A/T I have on my Trailblazer (I got 65k out of my previous set, have 30k on the current set and still lots of life left), but I do not like the Destination LE2 my Silverado has on it that the previous owner put on.

 

[therealsethallen]

I have Yokohama Geolanders on the 9-7x. They've been on since Halloween weekend. So, they've got probably right about 11k miles on them. There's a bit of road noise but it's not excessive. They have much better traction than the Goodyear Assurance CS Fuel Max that were previously on there.

 

[richphotos]

This is just me, but I am not sure I would get new tires.

Every time I see a vehicle that is listed for sale for parts, because of an accident or a blown engine or transmission, they ALWAYS have new tires.
Coincidence? I think not!

But that being said, got the truck with hankook dynapro atm. They are pretty loud, and I also think a bit too beefy for a 2wd.. but who am I to judge.