Woo hoo tires
So this is sort of a straw poll about a rather unfortunate incident that happened on Sunday evening. We traveled over the pass to visit my father because he had surgery on Thursday. It was all well and good, but driving back about 25 miles out of Seattle the right rear tire went flat. It was unfortunate for a few reasons, but the first of which was we were traveling with an infant and it woke him up and was delaying our getting home.
Now I was able to change the tire and get the spare on, but we didn't want to travel far on it so we stopped at my wife parents that were only 15 miles away rather than complete the 50 or so final miles on the doughnut spare. We borrowed their car and went home, and my father-in-law was going to take the car in to get the warranty work done in the morning. We had bought the tires at Costco, and we have only driven about 30k of the 60k mile warranty. I didn't want one odd sized tire, and asked that he make sure we get both rear tires replaced. They charged me $40 for the damaged one, and $170 for the other and argued the whole time that it was a waste of money and made my in-laws wait a few hours for their trouble to boot.
Do you always replace at least two tires at a time? It's a front wheel drive and everything I've ever heard (from my parents and consumer opinion) makes me think you should do two. I thought it was important because they were already 50% done to not put just one brand new tire on.
What do you think was I wasting money or were the tire people being jerks?
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I worked for several years in a preventative maintenance department of a dealership. The owner was VERY against pushing things people didn't REALLY need.
ReplyDeleteBut yes, unless the tires are nearly new and hardly worn, once you have put some miles on them, you want to replace two if you have to replace one. Alignment, braking and gas mileage being your main reasons why. If the tire people were telling you otherwise, they were being lazy jerks!