are cheap tires worth it?

tires are the only part of your vehicle that touches the road. every input you give the car, steering, braking, accelerating, is delivered through four contact patches roughly the size of your hand.

that is the reason the cheapest set is rarely the cheapest decision.

what you actually give up

wet braking distance. this is the big one. the gap between a good tire and a budget one, from highway speed on a wet road, is measured in car lengths. not percentages. car lengths.

tread life. a budget tire rated for 60,000 kilometres against a better one rated for 100,000 means you buy two sets instead of one, and pay to have them fitted twice.

noise and comfort, which sounds cosmetic until you have driven three hours on a set that drones.

winter performance. an all season tire hardens as the temperature drops. cheap all seasons harden sooner and harder, which is exactly the wrong behaviour in an Ontario February.

the arithmetic

work out the cost per kilometre rather than the price on the wall.

a set at $600 lasting 60,000 kilometres costs a cent a kilometre. a set at $900 lasting 100,000 costs nine tenths of a cent. the expensive set is cheaper, and it stops better for the whole time you own it.

that is before the fitting you pay for twice, and before the accident that did not happen.

where cheap tires do make sense

they are not always wrong. on a vehicle you are selling in six months, on a seldom-driven second car, or on a trailer, a budget tire is a reasonable decision made knowingly.

what we object to is a budget tire fitted to a family car on the highway because nobody explained the difference.

what we will tell you

what each set costs, what it is rated for, and what you are giving up at the bottom of the range. then you choose. we started as Arrow Tire and we have been selling tires here a long time, and the fastest way to lose somebody is to put them on tires that scare them in the rain.