What is the correct tire rotation pattern?

NutzAboutBoltz has a video of tire rotation for gen 3s.

 

Re: cross rotation of tyres, some tyres these days have a rotational direction. That means that you cannot interchange left and right tyres or they will rotate in the wrong direction. In the olden days, tyres with a rotational direction were very rare. So that's probably where the different instruction between gen 1 and 2/3 comes from.
That having said: rotate tyres? I haven't done that on any of my cars. The only "rotation" I do is when two tyres need to be changed, I make sure that they go on front.

 

Old thread, but I'm with Maarten28. I have -never- rotated the tires on Pearl S (other than when moving the car that is ). They seem to wear evenly regardless.

 

In the U.S., when buying only two new ties, many shops won't put them on the front. Management safety policy requires they go on back.

This practice seems to derive from the tendency of old-technology cars to lose directional control during hard emergency braking. The tires with better traction stop shorter, while the poorer set continues to slide. When that extra sliding is on the rear, that tends to cause the rear to swing around the front. Most normal drivers, myself included, don't handle emergency maneuvering well when facing backwards.

When the rear tires have the better grip, the car tends to stay pointed forward, allowing better driver control. Plus, in the event of a crash, the primary occupant protection features remain best oriented to perform their functions.

With the addition of ABS and stability control, the tendency of modern cars to spin out is significantly reduced, but not eliminated. These systems cannot magically create traction out of thin ice.

Regular tire rotations help minimize this front/back traction asymmetry over the life of the tire set. This completely avoids the 'best tires on front or rear' dispute. Approximately matched, symmetric traction is better than either.

With separate summer and winter tire sets (on separate rims, so no yearly remounting or long waiting lines with the first winter storm warning), my tire rotations occur with the seasonal tire swap. Thus, it creates no extra cost or labor.

 

Uhm, yeah, I got it wrong. The best tyres go on the rear wheels.

 

On p. 217 of my 2002 Prius Owner's Manual, the tire rotation pattern is illustration 82P104, identical to the one above labeled 82P104a. So the larger picture above applies to Gen 1.

I'm having tires rotated tomorrow in accordance with the larger diagram.

 

Bumping this old thread. Bridgestone has different cross pattern rotations for front wheel drive and rear wheel drive cars, which are just mirror images of each other:

https://www.bridgestoneamericas.com/content/corpcomm/americas/en/company/safety/maintaining-tires/tire-rotation/_jcr_content/root/layoutmain/sectiongroup_1544638/section-content/image.img.jpg/1647263726068.jpg

Why? Each tire goes to a new position on each rotation either way. If that link dies, it comes from:

https://www.bridgestoneamericas.com/en/company/safety/maintaining-tires/tire-rotation#

General Tires says to follow the car manufacturer's suggestion. That makes very little sense, the manufacturer cannot know if the tires installed on the vehicle, except at sale, are directional or not. Seems to me that a lot of this is "coverage of butt" legal maneuvering. The tire manufacturer says to do what the car manufacturer suggests, and sometimes vice versa.

Michelin's page is quite confusing.

Tire Rotation Guide: Vehicle Types & Care - Michelin USA

It shows the same cross pattern as general, but doesn't say under which conditions each should be used. The only "same side" rotation pattern shown is for duallies.

 

Since my Falken Sincera tires are radials (as in 175/65R14 (R meaning radial), I'm following the diagram given in the Bridgestone link:

Straight Rotation
Straight rotation was developed in the early years of radial tires. This rotation method switches the tires front-to-rear but does not cross side to side. This rotation method is used for directional tread patterns.




...which is also the method shown in the Owner's Manual for my 2002 (see my post above).

 

I have been researching tire rotation patterns and found lots of opinions but not a single reference to actual data to support the supposed benefits of the various wear patterns. This is one of the most data free subject I have ever encountered. It feels more like religion than engineering. There are literally tens of thousands of sources giving information, all repeating the same dogma, with not a shred of analysis or experimentation made or cited to support any of it.

Anyway, there are anecdotal reports that early radials had a problem when they were swapped side to side. Somehow or other they became "directional" with use. Consequently they were prone to failure when moved to the other side. Plausible, it might even be true. Still, no data, is no data. Radial usage in the US wasn't the norm until the 1970s and this problem might still have been unresolved at that time. Over half a century ago. That would account for the suggestions at that time to not swap tires from side to side. It is of course always going to be true for directional tires. I have yet to find a shred of evidence that swapping modern radials in a(ny) cross pattern is dangerous.

What about the front to back vs back to front cross rotation patterns for FW and RW drive cars? There is a discussion thread on that here:

https://bobistheoilguy.com/forums/threads/why-the-different-crossing-pattern-when-rotating-tires.333332/

There was one suggestion (post 27, but again, no citation to actual data) that moving the tires from the driven wheels to the other position on the same side would eliminate the noise which might result from some wear patterns if they were swapped directly to the other side, and that swapping it to the other side and end on the next tire rotation would even out wear in other ways. Plausible. Maybe even correct. It is a testable hypothesis for somebody with access to a quiet track, a good sound level meter, and the time and motivation to make sound level measurements in the original and both of the tire rotation variants. I'm not that motivated, and besides, do not have access to anything resembling a constant noise level track.

So why do so many car manufacturers now just say to swap front and back on the same side?

Could be inertia - something left over from when radials really did need to be rotated like that.
Could be butt covering - avoids problems if somebody has directional tires on but doesn't know it.
Could be there really is a reason - too bad none of the manufacturers felt it was worth divulging what that might be.

Update - we are now not entirely data free! Found a single paper from 1973, and only the abstract is publicly available. It's conclusion - in terms of tire wear it doesn't matter if the tires are rotated at all:

Effects of Rotation Patterns on Tread Life Evaluation in: Tire Science And Technology Volume 1: Issue 4 | Tire Science & Technology

Maybe the body of the paper had something to say about noise, but I doubt it.

 

That was from Firestone trying to invent reasons why their first radials would blow out on a regular basis while the much better engineered Michelins did not.

All I know is my lifetime of Michelin use have never blown out or bubbled. Good enough that any new car that comes with something else is immediately fitted with Michelin. Which gets me 90k or more per set with free cross rotations.

Except for my current Cross Climate 2 Michelins due to our newly routine ice storms in Central Texas.

As far as horses go:

 

Reports of the horse’s death were greatly exaggerated.

 

I found it interesting that the directional Michelin X-Ices I got for this winter were made in China.

 

At the other end of that spectrum the Bridgestone Dueler A/T tires that came stock on my son's F350 Super Duty only have about 1/3 of their tread left at just under 15k miles. That is with relatively light driving for such a vehicle, less than 2k miles towing, and that with a trailer at less than half the rated load. No rock crawling, or anything like that, just highway and around town.