Tire Spec’ing: Compiling your top priorities

This is Part One of a three-part story. Click here for Part Two and Part Three.

What you'll learn in this story:

• How to get started with the tire-purchase process
• How to identify your fleets tire priorities
• The top factors our readers used to rank tires

You can research all you want, but spec’ing tires is less a matter of science than faith. All tire suppliers promise their products will deliver long life, durability, traction, good fuel mileage, and resistance to irregular wear, and they have the spec sheets to back those claims up. What matters to fleets is the degree to which a chosen tire delivers on each of those promises. Unless you have the road data to verify those claims, spec’ing new tires is a practice in faith that the tires will perform as expected.

If you are re-upping on tried-and-tested tires, it can become more a matter of trust, though even then there are many other variables that can change, such as vehicle model year, routes, and even loads. Tire makers offer an ever-changing array of products to suit a wide range of applications, including steer, drive, and trailer tires for regional, long-haul, and urban operations. There are vocational tires, off-road tires, tires for dump trucks, tires for refuse trucks…you get the point.

But all things considered, being able to combine scientific facts, faith, and budgetary constraints into a successful tire strategy is a managerial art form. It takes experience, wisdom, legwork, and sometimes failure. Fortunately, decades of driving for and covering the trucking industry have taught me a thing or two about tire spec’ing to help you sculpt your tire program into shape.

Getting started

Obviously, identifying what you’ll be asking of your tires and where they will be operating is the first step. But even that’s not always straightforward. For example, an on-highway, low rolling resistance rib tire won’t last long running on gravel roads. The extent of the exposure matters. 

The benchmark for declaring a tire off-road, or maybe super-regional, is usually anything above 10% of its mileage in an unintended environment. It’s safe to say the odd delivery to an out-of-the-way destination or a gravelly truckstop parking lot won’t prematurely kill such tires—but they won’t do the tire any favors either.

The risk in this case is that low rolling resistance tires tend to have thinner treads and therefore less rubber for an object such as a rock or a nail to pass through, making the tire more susceptible to puncture.

Spec’ing a tire without regard for where it will operate is a bit like spec’ing a downsped driveline for a stop-and-go environment, or rolling, hilly two-lane roads. It’s not the best choice.

“Fleets should address tire selection no differently than selecting the other drivetrain components,” advised Tom Clauer, Yokohama Tire’s senior manager of commercial product planning. “Too often tires are considered an add-on or accessory: Changing this thought to 'tires are a valued drivetrain component that needs to work in harmony with your equipment choices' can make a world of difference.”

Clauer said fleets should also prioritize the tire attributes they value most. “Knowing your operation and also knowing what you value most—long mileage, fuel efficiency, traction, etc.—all play into selecting a tire.”

In the next part of this story, we'll discuss different types of tire buyers, what they value, and how they can track those values to make sure they're maximizing their tire ROI.