I get about 60K miles on a new set of Michelins for my Corolla.
I bought a used car once that had a fresh set of Tiger Paws installed shortly before I bought it. Anyways, I got about 60K more out of them
They wore evenly and tracked straight. I said that second part, because some tires tend to follow grooves and ruts in the road. The Tiger Paws didn’t do that. They stayed on course
Overall a fair set of tires
@GeorgeSanJose Which Michelin?
I’m asking, because there are so many different ones, now
Over 50 years of driving we tended to get better tire mileage from the rear wheel and AWD cars and trucks then fwd vehicles with comparable tires… These things just seem to eat tires if you aren’t very careful about " when" you accelerate or brake, if not driving in a straight line. . That is true for all cars but more so with front drive. There was typically at least 10k difference in tire wear for us.
I put 70,000 miles on a set of Goodyear Wrangler SR-As. That alone is not the impressive part. What makes it a feat is the fact that I bought them used with 20k miles already on them, plus I only rotated them 3 times and only balanced them once.
Loved those tires
@dagosa, I agree with the FWD tire wear, when you make one pair do EVRYthing, it will take its toll. Since the rears pretty much just hold up the rear bumper, rotating tires is essential or you will end up like my dad. 103,000 miles on an original pair of rear tires on his FWD Buick Skylark after 10 years. Hard as a rock and so noisy you couldn’t talk to each other in the car at 40 mph. His automotive engineer son (me) insisted he replace them. His reply; Why, they still have tread on them.
@DangerousDIY: The Goodyear Wranglers were good tires. My gf had a set on her old SUV (they went with it to the junkyard) and they had about 100K on them I estimate. (the odometer, speedometer, and numerous other things were broken)
@Mustangman. There are a lot of guys out there who just keep buying new fronts and never rotate. I just wonder how your dad took the abuse of the rears…and the fronts when they were badly worn. I live in snow country (130 inches so far this year) and having the tread the same on all fours is critical. If your dad never drives over 55 and stays out of bad weather…what the heck. Did he listen to you ?
@db4690 … why Michelin tires for the Corolla? B/c I buy them from Costco – they only offered 3 tires at the time that fit – and Michelin was the best choice of the three according to the CR ratings.
Last time I checked their website Costco doesn’t offer a single tire that fits the Corolla now, so when the current set wears out I’ll be looking elsewhere for tires it appears.
BTW, I concur w/your assessment on Tiger Paws; I have those on my truck and they are a good choice for a road use truck tire from my experience.
@GeorgeSanJose Please reread my question . . .
I didn’t ask “why Michelin” . . . I asked “which Michelin”
Out of the various Michelin tires out there, which exact one did you install . . . ?
@dagosa Dad didn’t drive far or fast nor did he listen to me because HE was an engineer (civil), too, and just like me, always right! 
He’d replaced the fronts 3 times. Usually AFTER the first snowfall when he could barely get to out of the neighborhood. Since he was a very defensive and conservative driver, he never had a situation where he spun the car with those rocks he had rolling on the rear. He did wear the front brakes to the metal while listening to the wear indicators squeal for weeks. He figured the squeal would eventually go away. It did, along with the brakes.
Since I was mention in the original post, I thought I’d chime in here. My tire mileage is all over the charts. I have has some very long lasting tires, and I have worn some out way before their time.
I guess my worse set was Bridgestone Turanza S tires on my 90 Dodge Colt, about 3k miles. I was driving on some back country roads very very aggressively. I replaced them with a set of identical tires, slowed down a few MPH and stopped sliding through the corners and got 40k on the next set.
The most miles I got was from a set of Firestone FR480 tires on my 97 Nissan PU, I hated every one of those miles too as the tires had very poor traction and were very noisy. I used Michelin X1 tires next, much better traction and much lower noise, but they only lasted 50 miles, The current set of BFG tires have 40k and they need replacing now.
I got 101k miles off a set of Bridgestone Turanza LST tires on my Saturn and they could have lasted maybe another 20k, these are the ones I used on a 7k cross country with 92k at the start of the trip. But Costco has a special sale on the Michelin Hydroedge tires that I could not refuse. They had 90k on them when I sold the Saturn but still had about half their tread left. I did not drive easy on them either, I do corner quite a bit faster than most people.
I think the things that affect tire life the most are (in order);
Alignment
Tire characteristics (type of rubber, design, etc)
Tire pressure
Reducing the number of tire rotations to a minimum (varies by vehicle type)
Driver aggression (only at the extreme)
You need three things to monitor tire life, a very good tire pressure gauge, a tire tread depth gauge and now an IR thermometer.
The tire tread depth gauge is very important because it can help you spot tire wear patterns much sooner than you can do visually so that you can make adjustments to the ideal air pressure and alignments before too much damage is done.
BTW, my new Subaru has Bridgestone Turanza EL-400 tires. At 16k that have just a little over 9/32" tread (10/32" is new). I’m gonna hate those tires for a long time unless I just decide to bite the bullet and put on a better set of tires.
I can’t tell you any stories about long tire life because I drive too hard. I don’t generally exceed 10 mph over the limit now that I am old but I don’t slow around curves or corners as much as most.
I can tell you the shortest tire life I ever got. I put a set of Atlas Buycron tires on my 56 DeSoto. They had a soft butyl rubber compound and were sold as a tire that would not squeal. They were great in the rain, sucking two dry tracks in the road. I could hunt sports cars in the rain on twisty roads.
7000 miles later the were down to the cords.
IIRC, Atlas Tires were available exclusively at Esso and other Standard Oil gas stations.
I believe that Standard Oil owned Atlas, but I could be wrong on that point.
I recall a few of my brother’s friends who bragged about mounting “Bucs” on their hot-rodded cars, but I don’t recall them mentioning lousy tread life. Obviously they wouldn’t have bragged about that facet of their tire’s performance.
Anyway, here is an old newspaper ad for Atlas Bucron tires:
http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=atlas+bucron+tires&view=detailv2&&&id=561570C6D1233F279B1083C5EF32C34C8BB47663&selectedIndex=5&ccid=jBt84qwu&simid=608020490347479824&thid=HN.608020490347479824&ajaxhist=0
MG McAnick,
Sorry I didn’t respond, but I had a family emergency, and was out of internet range for a while.
So to answer your question, the variables were location and type of service. a) Southern Florida, new concrete, EXTREMELY frequent turning (Telephone company trucks installing phone lines houses in a new subdivision) vs b) St. Louis to Kansas City and return trip every day.
Bottomline: I have frequently encountered situations where tires do not last very long due to the service and the opposite - extremely good wear due to the service. So while make and model tire might be important, do not rely on other’s mileage to gauge how good a tire wears - too many variables.
@db4690 writes …
Which Michelin? I'm asking, because there are so many different ones, now
Answer: X Radial
IIRC, Atlas Tires were available exclusively at Esso and other Standard Oil gas stations.
Atlas Supply Co. was a supplier of Tires, Batteries, and Accessories, jointly owned by Chevron USA and Exxon.
Atlas usually had 3-5 lines of tires, some of them being very good, the majority being made by Dayton and Cooper . The biggest selling point was the mileage and road hazard warranty, good at any Chevron, Standard, or Exxon station. In the 1980’s a tire with a 60,000 mile warranty was a pretty good thing. Atlas batteries were also pretty good products with a good pro-rate warranty.
Of course when gas stations stopped servicing cars that spelled the end for Atlas.
I well remember the “Red Brute”, Atlas’s top battery. It was guaranteed to start your car in any weather.
I bought a used car that had an Atlas battery. It wasn’t anything spectacular, nor horrible either. It lasted 4 years as I recall.
The low profile tires that they put on many passenger cars these days do not last as long as the conventional profile tires used to. Also, generally speaking, the higher the speed rating, the shallower the tread when the tire is new, and the shorter the life.
Back when I had two Volvo 240s, I used Michelin X tires and reliably got 90k to 100k miles on them in Sacramento. The right rear always wore the fastest. The differential seemed to favor the right rear and I suspect it slid a little on downshifts.
My wife went through her first set of Michelin Sport A/S Plus tires ($1000 a set) in 30k miles on her BMW 330i. She won’t have anything else because she loves the way they handle wet or dry. The second set we put on seems to be holding up bit better. These tires use three different rubber compounds across the tread face. The softest rubber (in the middle) wore out rather quickly on the first set, and yes, they were inflated properly. Michelin must have improved (or hardened) the center rubber compound.
I put a set of Yokohama Avid Ascend low profile tires on my BMW and so far, they are holding up great. 50k miles and they look like the day I put them on. They are made with orange oil rather than petroleum oil. Made in USA in a zero waste factory. They perform well and run smooth and quiet, which is a problem with the BMW sport suspension. I love these tires.