And I’ll bet that client never bought those tires again! The market has a way of weeding out bad products.
Same for these Indian tires…
Some regulations are necessary but all of them come with unintended consequences and nearly all come with additional costs to the consumer. The better written they are, the less problematic those unintended consequences will be.
I was trying just to point out what I thought those unintended consequences are likely to be.
I personally don’t know any of these people. But I’m sure the number is very high. My first concern with buying a tire is type. My last 4 vehicles have been SUV’s so I either get a good All-Season that’s snow rated or an AT rated tire. Next is quality. There are many good quality tires from many brands. I also want something that lasts. Especially when I was working. 50k+ miles is what I like. And last is price point. I love Cooper truck tires (not so much their car tires). And I love the Michelin truck and car tires. But for my SUVs and pickups I’ve owned I choose mainly Coopers. Michelins seem to last a litle longer but at a permium price. When averaging out miles/price the Coopers were cheaper overall.
I have known at least one. A friend from my undergraduate days was griping about tire prices, back in the late '60s, and he said, “It’s just a hunk of rubber that shouldn’t cost more than $25”.
His car–a '59 Pontiac–had Delta tires all around, but they were of 4 different types/models, and there was at least one tire that wasn’t the correct size. Luckily, he drove like Grandma, so this wasn’t as much of a hazard for him as it would have been for many other people.
Buyer beware. If I buy a pair of shoes, or a car, or a steak, based on price and it doesn’t work like I think it should, I won’t buy that brand again. Simple. We don’t need laws for that.
I love the tires I have on my car right now. Ride and handling is smooth and quiet, treadwear is excellent (I’m on track to get 80K out of these tires), wet traction is awful. I’d buy these again in a minute because they offer what is important to me. I can’t get behind the idea that someone else gets to decide what’s best for me.
Don’t get me wrong, we’ve seen time and again that cheap auto parts and repairs can be incredibly expensive in the long run. But we can’t start making those choices for other people, just ourselves.
Delta tires? Haven’t heard that name in years. I had a local tire shop that would consign Delta tires to me, but I was never impressed with them and didn’t sell very many.
I’m pretty sure that they were… not the best… but he shopped for tires purely on the basis of price. I seriously doubt that he would have been impressed with any info on their performance or quality.
One year I switched from Goodyear to coopers at the farm store. When I compared th3 cost per mile, the Goodyears were actually cheaper. My record was 110,00 miles on the Goodyears with no casing problems versus maybe 80,000 on the coopers with some casing failures. I’ve not worried about price much since then although I will put cheaper tires on my Pontiac. When I get more years than mikes now, seems like I never wear them out but wreck them with nails and other road hazards.
That’s it right there.
Because they know better than us.
Everybody has a story. I needed tires but I wanted to get another year out of my car and wanted whitewalls. The tire shop sold me some no name tires for close to $100. This was a few years ago like 15. I never could identified who made them. Maybe China, maybe India. At any rate they were one of the best tires I ever had. Quiet, good in snow and rain, and handled well. I would hate to think that the do Gooders could prevent me from buying them.
The reasons we DO need some basic Laws on tires, the most important factor in a vehicle’s safety and performance are…
The bottom line is that practically all the manufacturers have good quality 2nd tier, lower cost tires typically sold under another Brand Name or Private Label that would not be affected BUT as costs go up I’ve seen some even lower cost, shoddy, products start to appear that frankly shouldn’t be allowed on the road.
Buying tires that you know have poor wet road performance just does not sound like a responsible choice by someone who shares the road with other people.
The discussion isn’t about the quality of the tires, it’s about low rolling resistance and removing tires from the marketplace because they don’t meet state guidelines. Maybe I like to keep my snow tires on the car year round. Maybe I’m more interested in my weekend baja rally than I am in improving my gas mileage. Or maybe I refuse to buy anything other than the absolute bottom of the price ladder. The point is the marketplace should decide what sells and what doesn’t.
Responsible to whom? I’m beholden to myself and my needs before anyone else’s. Operating a car isn’t an altruistic proposition. I buy what I want and am willing to pay for. When it comes to tires I want (in this order):
-A smooth and quiet ride that handles nicely.
-Decent tread life. I rarely keep a car for longer than one set of tires, but I don’t want to buy tires every 30K miles.
-A price point I find acceptable, there are a lot of other things I like to spend money on.
-Traction.
Now if I were an avid snowboarder and went up to the slopes all winter long traction will be higher on the list. If we were talking about my kid’s car, price will be first.
I would not buy a low rolling resistance tire. To me that means less grip on the road. I want a sticky tire, not a hard one.
Must have been about 1959 before many tire regulations. I went with my dad to the local gambles store. They had an ad in the paper for four tires for $90. We needed tires before our vacation trip. So did we buy on price? Yeah. What was wrong with that? Gambles, like tempo, like sears, etc. was a legitimate place to buy tires and refrigerators. I find it hard to fault someone for buying tires on price.
That’s $1021 in 2026 dollars, just for perspective.
4 for $99.99 sales was still going on in the 2000’s and later, we used to do it quite often to move tires, install only, no carry out… Been some years though since the last sale like that… I did the Dayton Quadra Se’s (Tires Plus version of the FS tires) and then Primewell PS 830/850’s… Once there was very little demand for the 13, 14, and 15" tires, we stopped doing it…
We would have automatic Road Hazard and Lifetime Balance on the tires for max service gross profit and then discount the c.r.a.p out of the tires to get the price down to the 4 for $99.99 price… We sold a lot of cheap tires that a way as some buyers only cared about the price, but we also were able to up sale a lot of tires when we showed the customer the benefits of a better tire…
+1
I was about to say, $90 in the 50’s, 60’s and even the 70’s was a big difference the what it is now a days…
Responsible to the other vehicle you slide into and wreck on a rainy day.
Yes, this happened to me, stopping at a red light, by an idiot behind me.
Yeah and that was cash back then. No credit cards. Of course some had department store cards but you would go to the bank if you needed money. I don’t know the figures but I suspect there were fewer bankruptcies.
Doesn’t matter the cost of the tire if they are bald.
Yep, drove from Utah to Minnesota on recap snow tires.