Best Tires: A Buyer’s Guide for 2023 – Car Talk

Choosing a Quality Tire Brand

Why bother spending more money on the best tire brands when you could save tons of money buying tires from some random hoops from the Dollar Store? Tires are all the same, right? Round, black and smelly.

Not so fast. There is an incredible amount of research that goes into just the rubber compound of specific tires, long before any design considerations are made on how the tread works, how the belts overlap or how heavy duty the sidewall is.

Depending on your usage, you could destroy a cheap set of tires in a day. Literally. If your mission is to take your vehicle off-road, for example, and you’ve chosen a sub-standard brand of tires, a sharp rock could easily puncture a hole in the sidewall and your day is over. Those are exactly the hazards that the brand name tire manufacturers are hoping to protect you from when they invest the money in research and development, rather than just fulfilling the round-black-smelly opening ante.
Consider one tire, for example, BF Goodrich’s All-Terrain T/A K02. It’s one of the most popular all-terrain tires in the business and BF Goodrich has spent a ton of money marketing it since it was introduced in 2014, which is why you might think you could choose a lesser brand. Why pay more for a tire just because the company that makes it spent more on marketing?

But the money BF Goodrich spent went to prove that the K02 is the best tire in its class. When the tire was introduced, the company supplied these off-the-shelf tires for the Baja Challenge class in the Baja 1000 desert race. Every single vehicle that competed in that class wore the same tires that you could have delivered to your house today, and the point was to prove that tire’s durability during one of the world’s most punishing off-road races.

You’re just not going to get that kind of testing out of some tire manufacturer that is also known for making shirts.