Home Forums Gear Hunting Trucks and Four-Wheel Drives Acceptable age of truck tires?

19 y/o driver, turbo diesel and a heavy application of gravel on our road during the winter.

In ~130k I'd worn out three sets of tires, nothing changed other than the driver for the last ~10k miles.

Kids...sheesh!

Replace them. I had the side wall blow out on an 8 year old LTX. Fortunately, it started wobble so I was stopped when it blew out. I'm not sure it would have been controllable at highway speeds.

If it was my kid, he'd get the bill.

On a jeep I would run them until I saw a problem. Any little flaw will show up in the ride quality of the jeep. Old tires get bumps in them as they begin to come apart. The tire will start bouncing and you will know it in a jeep. Drive them for a while, Or build a trailer to run them on. Tires are too damn expensive to toss unless they are truly bad.

14 year old tires are indeed 'truly bad' for anything except low speed off road farm use.

I bought a used F250 a couple years ago. The tires had ~50% tread left, and I saw no visible signs of cracking. After driving 200 miles of my 400 mile trip home on the freeway at ~70MPH the left rear blew, luckily minimal damage to the wheel well and fender, but it scared the sh1t out of me.

After I checked the date codes on all the tires they were all over 10 years old, and the spare looked original with a date code matching the year of the truck ~14 years. This left me in the middle of the desert at dusk, and it took two hours for a tow truck to arrive so I could then tow it to a friend's house 100 miles away. And the next morning another 100 mile tow home. AAA Plus is worth every penny, as it only cost me $20 out of pocket for going a few miles over 100 on the first leg.

A spare will age out as well as the driven tires will. Unless they have a directional tread, you're better off to use a 5 tire rotation scheme. That will also add 20% to the life of your tires so you're not really out anything. It just costs more at longer intervals.
It's also a good way to make sure your spare tire carrier works right.

I bought my '08 pickup 4 years ago and it also has the original spare that's never been used. I'll need new tires next year and will likely replace all 5 and go to the 5 tire rotation.

The problem with a 5 tire rotation is most trucks these days don't come with a matching wheel on the spare. Heck, many don't come with even the same size wheel. If the wheels match it works out, but I don't worry too much about it otherwise.

I hadn't thought about that. Other than checking the winch, I've never had the spare off of mine to see just what it does have.

Yeah, you usually have to hunt ebay for a spare matching wheel to do the 5-tire rotation. My spare wheel on the Jeep matches the rest, so I bought 5 Dick Cepek Extreme Country radials. Got them delivered for $893 from Jegs, which I thought wasn't too shabby (33x12.50/R15).