I really hope the person who started this has left the building and gone to a real tire store.
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The SnowFlake needs to be more invisibleā¦
Cāmon, that was a joke. And a good one.
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No it was not a good joke. Have you even read some of the terrible advice the Snowman posts?
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Oh for Kreldan sake lighten up. Are you perchance from vulcan?
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Nobody will entertain that request, but it is not an unusual sight, even on late model vehicles just 2 or 3 years old.
When a vehicle owner has a punctured tire, they stop at the nearest ārealā tire store for repair/replacement. Tire stores of different franchises carry different brands of tires and customers take what they can get.
At least once each month I will see something like Bridgestone, Michelin and Yokohama on the same vehicle. If they are travelling on a weekend, they will take the tire that is available.
If a customer goes to a tire store that sells the brand they need, there are so many tire models from each manufacture, it is unlikely they will have a matching tire in stock.
Example: Original equipment is Bridgestone Turanza ER33.
Tire stores stock Bridgestone Turanza EL400, Bridgestone Potenza Sport or Bridgestone Potenza RE980.
One of my college friends had a '59 Pontiac, and it rode on tires that were of the same brand, but 4 different models and 4 different degrees of tread wear. Two of them were not even the correct size. But, because he drove like Grandma, he never got into any trouble with the differing traction coefficents.
My biggest fear when riding in his car was that he would slow down so much in order to enter a gas station or a strip mall that we came very close to being T-boned a few times.
Heh heh. Like I said my 59 Pontiac rode on Firestone recaps. Who knows who made the casings? Four for $100 or two snow tires for $50 back in 1968. Funny but never had one fail. Of course that was 60 hours of work at $1.65 an hour during school breaks. (And a semester tuition at $425)
Politics aside, buying European, Japanese and Korean tires made in Chinese is not the same as buying Chinese owned brands. Chinese owned tires manufacturers donāt have the same level of expertise in design, engineering and manufacturing. The difference is in the engineering, design, selection of suppliers and quality control. Until they started exporting, these new Chinese firms never dealt with the powerful safety oversight and recall agencies that Korean, Japanese, North American and European companies have had. Chinese tires have higher failure rates caused by inconsistent quality of materials too. They often claim high mileage, but that mileage comes at the cost of hard tread that canāt stop as quickly, corner as sharply, and gets tire rot cracks in 3 years instead of 5. In addition you may get a bonus gift from all that bogus engineering and marginal quality control: A tire blow-out at high speed on the hottest day of the year.
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