One of the tyres on my bay still has 8mm of tread on it. Unfortunately the side wall looks like this. Its gonna be the third one i've had to have replaced with more than 6mm of tread left. Getting rather expensive.
know how you feel but its all about doing the miles i suppose cant win either way , and its prob cheaper than petrol anyway. and safer too
That's normal. I don't think you'll find many people who wear out their tires before they expire from age.... maybe a city bus. Tires are changed by their age (DOT) not thread wear (not in most cases anyway) Depending on make, you should get around 3-5 years out of a tire, considering it's not sat on a shelf for 2 years before you bought it and been regularly stored and used. Rubber rots much faster when left to stand idle.
We wear tyre tread out over here, probably because of the incredible mileage ( kilometerage ?) we drive or perhaps it's because of our rubbish roads.
I've managed to wear out the tyres on my t25. Well 3 of them anyway. Not sure how the 4th still has 3mm of tread on it when they were all fitted at the same time. My camper spends more time sitting around than driving so thats probably why the sidewalls have gone. I do pump them all up to 50 psi when i park it up though. I can literally pull the tread off my bugs tyres by hand and push a screwdriver though the sidewalls its been sitting on flats for so long.
The reason is that legislation requires tyres to be bio-degradable. Get yourselves some pukka 70's Michelin rubber and this will never happen. We had 2 on our beetle and no cracks but sadly 10 years sat in the same position had caused very slight flats on them so they had to go.
I bought M&S Vredesteins for the T3, they were cheap at £54.50 each, had to, the tyres were at least 12 to 15 years old.
I don't think the tyres on the T2 are more than 12 months old, they'll get a trip down from Scotland to Shropshire when we pick it up, and the following weekend I'm off to Portsmouth in it, to pick up some T4 panels, ha, it'll be busy.
Before anyone says it, M&S tyres don't increase fuel consumption, at least not for me, I got 43.2mpg average for a recent trip to Birmingham in the T3...
I've still got the original 1988 Michelin N in the spare wheel tray of my t25. Never used and still mint. Doesn't hold air anymore though.
I recently drove a mates reliant scimitar thats still running the original goodyear tyres from 1971. Every corner was taken with loads of 70's car chase squeel and it was possible to loose the back end at 15mph. Not safe by any means but it was great fun though.
