The Pros of not rotating your tires

i don't

 

Mine will wear out pretty evenly before I get around to thinking about rotation a few of my cars have been like this but many have not you won't do that on a Toyota Corolla or you might and your back tires and your front tires will outwear your front pretty quickly.

 

When I had a single tire needing to change due to an unrepairable puncture on my Gen3, I replaced a pair instead of just one or all four. The tires when replaced were about 15Kmiles on the OEM Bridgestone Ecopia EP20. I think all four tires were half worn, and had 5/32-6/32 or so tread on them. I put the new pair of Ecopia EP422 Plus (9/32 when new) on the rear axle as recommended.

From that point on, I stopped doing routine 5Kmiles front-to-back tire rotation. Of course, this made the front pair of tires reach the legal limit sooner than the rear tires always. When the front two tires are worn out, I purchased two new tires, put them on the rear, and moved the half-worn rear tires to the front. And the process starts again. The Pro is that I only need to purchase two tires at a time. The Con is front pair is always more worn out. Since I still had to change the tires for the winter, it really did not save time or money for the labor of tire rotation though.

But on my current PP, I am following a ~5Kmiles front-to-back tire rotation schedule. I don't do it strictly by the miles but instead, do it twice a year when the summer and winter tires on wheels are swapped. Since my current driving is about 10Kmiles/year. With 6 months winter and 6-month summer tires, they average about every 5Kmiles rotation although the summer tires tend to get more miles driven than winter. No additional work or cost, so it works for me. And so far, all tires are evenly worn. But so far, I have less than 5K miles on the OEM Dunlop Enasaver tires. On the other hand, the winter tires Michelin Xice have been used for all 3 PPs I owned. It is now 4 years old and total 10Kmiles on them, but showing very little wear so far.

 

The Pros of not rotating your tires:

* Getting milkshakes without having to go to a restaurant
* Meeting new people at the tire store more often
* Not having to buy upgraded car audio that will be ruined by the waaah-waaah-waaah of cupped rear tires.
* An increased chance of getting a new car early due a traction related forced replacement
* Not being hated for having the best MPG scores in Fuelly
* Not knowing about what's going on in your braking system that you can't see because the tire is in the way

I learned the hard way when I was a young-un.
I rotate my tires regularly.
Despite being well known for being an enthusiastic driver I always get rated tread wear plus plus (usually 50% over.)
I also notice that I don't have to think about working on my brakes until I'm on the back side of 150,000 miles.

I do the rotation myself...even if the tires come with free rotation and spin balance.
That way I can torque the lugs evenly and inspect and, if necessary, clean my brakes.

MY mileage.
YOURS will probably vary.
If your car runs good it is good.

There's people who check their oil regularly.....
There's people who don't.
Sometimes.....like if you trade cars out every four years or so, there's not much of a difference either way.

 

Do you mean "Pros of rotating your tires"

 

Maybe rotate them half as often, and you'll achieve roughly the same wear, save some labour/expense?

Moot point for me, swapping from all-seasons to snows and vice versa, every fall and spring.

 

Nope.

Like I said.
MY mileage.
Yours might vary.

 

i don't do anything to my car but drive it and yearly oil change. put new tires on at 40k and now at 80k have a good 1/8" to the wear indicators in front and more in the back.

wear is perfectly even, although the dealership tried to sell me an alignment at 15k with the 'free' oil change.

 

OK, I get you are being cryptic. Maybe it is a tongue-in-a-cheek expression. I am just having trouble understanding your convoluted way of expressing simple logic.

How not rotating tires is a PRO leading to for example?
Meeting new people at the tire store more often...

EDIT: Never Mind! After reading your comment again, I think I got what you are trying to say. Yeah, double negative threw me off. And some more deep thinking was necessary. But I got it.

 

If I rotated my tires like I was supposed to in the heyday of when I was driving a lot I would have been rotating my tires every 14 days something along those lines I was replacing tires about every 6 months and generally I run 40,000 45,000 mi type tires because I want them to stay black and nice looking generally so having the Michelin 100,000 mi tires that from $45,000 or 50,000 mi on look like gray hell or whatever I'm changing my tires when that starts right around 40 45,000.

 

Assuming front tires wear more rapidly than rears, if you rotate tires at recommended intervals the ones that started in front will always be more worn than the other two. If you rotate at the recommended interval the first time, but at twice that interval thereafter, the ones that started in front will be more worn than the others only half the time overall, and equally as worn on average. Plus, you save labor without losing the advantages of rotation.

 

https://www.tirerack.com/tires/tiretech/techpage.jsp?techid=43

Generally speaking rules of thumb are only rules for thumbs.

There's a whole world of theories about tire rotation periodicities, running pressures, rotation patterns, etc that people get into heated and passionate debates over.
It probably sits somewhere on the rancor scale between oil viscosity and change periodicities, and political party affiliation or vaccines and mask wearing (a redundancy in the US.)

I'm just some internet chucklehead, and I don't even work on cars for a living, so I don't really care much.
HOWEVER (comma!)
The people who make their living being experts about such things generally recommend a 3000-5000 mile tire rotation periodicity and a "forward cross" pattern for little egg-shaped, FWD cars that use non-directional, non performance, consumer grade tires.

Two of my four GMCs are (sadly) FWD, and so I use a forward cross pattern and rotate them every 5K, running at door-jam sticker plus 10%, and I do this for the same reasons I use a 5K OCI.

It simplifies my maintenance scheduling.
It keeps me buying new cars every 15 years or so whether I need to or not.
I don't have to buy $220 tires nearly as often.
I get as good a mileage as a GMC can get (My 2020 Terrain gets about 30-32 mpg tank to tank)

Again.....MY mileage.
Yours will probably be different.

There's a BUNCH of reasons that people are not able to work on their own cars which can RADICALLY alter the ROI for the time and effort for tire rotations.

When I was deployed my CFO paid our car maintenance done, but like most military wives, she is VERY clear eyed about car maintenance, saving money for the stupid little things in life like eating and sleeping indoors, and the probability that expensive things will break when your lesser half is half a globe away.

SHE always insists that I rotate HER(*) tires every time I change the oil....at 5k.

(*) We have two kinds of vehicles. Hers and Ours.
Since I married WAY up - I view it as a small price to pay.

IYKYK.

 

I've always found it interesting that Toyota seemed to change their mind about forward-cross between Gen 1 and Gen 2. Maybe they figured only Gen 1 was sufficiently egg-shaped?

Gen 1:



Gen 2:




Gen 3:




Gen 4:



(I especially like how the Gen 3 drawing makes absolutely sure you can't mistake which way is the front.)

Don't tell anybody, but I still do forward-cross. Just habit, I guess.

I also mostly use the tire rotation reminder as a convenient time to inspect the brakes.

 

At the 5k mile tire rotation interval, there’s also a “visual” brake inspection. Except every 30k miles, when a “fuller” brake inspection is sub’s.

 

Canadians always had more sense about car maintenance than their southern neighbors.

WE worry about cars being reliable because we might break down in some skech neighborhood.
You guys have to worry about weather, terrain, and animals that never got the memo about humans being above them in the food chain.

 

you don't get a free milkshake?

 

I pretty much do the "fuller" brake inspection at every rotation. It still adds only minutes with all the wheels off.

 

Which tire shop offers a free milkshake? But, even if they do, I don't like milkshakes. Too sweet. And their coffee is worse.