tire rotation patterns: which one your vehicle takes

tires do not wear evenly, and which end wears first depends on what your vehicle does with its power.

on a front wheel drive car the front tires steer, take most of the braking and do all of the pulling. they wear out while the rears still look nearly new. rear wheel drive spreads it differently. all wheel drive spreads it again. rotating moves that wear around the vehicle so a set lasts closer to what you paid for, and so the car stays quiet and predictable as they age.

the pattern is not arbitrary. using the wrong one wastes the rotation, and on directional tires it can leave you with tires pointed the wrong way.

front wheel drive: the forward cross

fronts go straight to the back on the same side. rears come forward and cross to the opposite side.

rear wheel drive and all wheel drive: the rearward cross

the mirror image. rears come straight to the front on the same side, fronts go back and cross to the opposite side.

four wheel drive: the X pattern

everything moves diagonally. front left to rear right, rear right to front left, and the same on the other diagonal.

directional tires: front to back only

a directional tire is built to turn one way. moving it across the vehicle reverses it, which costs you wet grip and makes the tire noisy. so directional tires stay on their own side and simply swap front to back.

how to tell: look at the sidewall for an arrow, or the word ROTATION, next to a direction of travel. that arrow points towards the front of the car when the tire is fitted correctly. if you have ever wondered what the arrow on a tire means, that is it, and it is the reason your rotation pattern is different from your neighbour's.

different sizes front and rear: side to side, or not at all

some vehicles, particularly performance cars, run wider tires at the back than the front. those cannot be rotated front to back at all. if they are non-directional, they swap side to side. if they are directional as well as staggered, they cannot be rotated at all, and they simply wear out where they sit.

the spare

if you carry a full size spare that matches the other four, it goes into the rotation. five tires sharing the wear last longer than four. a compact temporary spare, the narrow one, never enters the rotation.

what rotation will not fix

this is the part most articles leave out, and it is the part that costs people money.

wear on the inside or outside edge only is an alignment problem. rotating those tires moves the damage to a different corner and the alignment carries on eating the next set. the alignment gets fixed first, then the rotation is worth doing.

cupping or scalloping, where the tread has scooped-out patches and the car drums at speed, usually means worn shocks or struts rather than the tires.

wear down the centre is over-inflation. wear on both edges is under-inflation. neither is solved by moving the tire somewhere else.

what we do about it

rotation is a separate job here rather than something folded into an oil change, so it appears as its own line and you can see what it costs. if your vehicle is already on the hoist we will tell you whether it is due, and you decide.

what we will not do is rotate a set of tires and say nothing about why they are wearing badly. if the wear pattern points at alignment, or at shocks and struts, you hear that before the tires move, because rotating tires onto a vehicle that is going to chew them the same way takes your money and solves nothing.