Quote:
Originally Posted by Trackrash
I agree that the 5 year thing is total BS. Planned Obsolescence. Pure and simple.
All you have to do, if you don't believe it, is to look at LT or trailer tiers. They don't rot out after five years.
I will say this, if you keep them out of the sun and apply tire dressing regularly, they can be made to last longer.
The Toyo RA-1s on the front of my 911 are way older than five years and have no cracking AND still grip well.
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I'm not going to speak for all the tire manufacturers out there, but, having spent a big chunk of my professional career in the automotive industry, and specifically in elastomers, there are a few things to point out here:
Tire design, especially for passenger cars, is a balancing act of rolling resistance (for fuel economy), friction/traction (for performance), and noise (the competition between the first two). Tires are a combination of material selection (natural rubber/latex, EPDM, silica, polyamides etc.), and construction (different layers of materials and manufacturing/bonding/curing processes). Add to all this the drive to reduce weight, and cost, and you have a very complex and competing set of goals. The material aspect cannot be understated: the base materials(especially natural rubber and EPDM) are, alone, not very good in terms of performance or aging. Therefore they have been combined with a long list of additives to help with all of this (carbon-black, process oils, anti-oxidants, etc.). Again, a real balancing act. If tire guys could get tires to last longer, they would offer them at a significant premium. Problem is, there really are not many materials to do all of the above, at any price (well, at any reasonable price). The material formulas are guarded very closely by the tire companies. Michelin, for example, treats the know-how just like the formula for Coca-Cola; only a few people really know it, and the process is so guarded it's VERY rare to even see tires made in their factories. They don't show much on their "tours"... Bottom line is that, today at least, tires have a shelf life, and until new materials come along that do everything else better, the trade off for performance will be aging. My $.02...