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Got my new michelins installed today. Now a another question about psi. Door says 32 in front and 38 in rear. Looks like tire store made them 35 all around. But my service shop i was at recently pumped my old ones to 42 in front and 45 in rear. Where do i want to be guys?? Lol!!
Get yourself a tread depth gauge. Measure all four tires on inside, center, and outside. Track the measurements and record the pressures you had set. Do this every few thousand miles and you will learn what pressure you need.
On my 285-60-18 tires, I settled in on about 37 front 42 rear. No relation to the stupid door plaque.
I love the empty opinions. It's all so tiresome. heh. It reminds me of the nutty LED headlight arguments a while back. People lost their minds until I showed the beam patterns. One guy told me I couldn't put LED bulbs in my fog lights because reasons. I tinkered with them even further, lining the black portions of the housings with metal tape and removing the black shrouds (they're H11 on the 2007). I now have great short distance and side illumination (great supplement to the low beams for night driving), plus they make excellent daytime running lights for two lane highways.
This isn't a measurement contest between forum members (heh x2) - it's where we share knowledge.
There's no magic dust that such-and-such manufacturer puts in tires.
The traction ratings don't tell you much, but the treadwear ratings are useful. Consider them compound hardness ratings.
You'll need hard compound tires if you want to go off road and not wear the tires very rapidly. You will need soft compound tires to have traction in the cold.
Putting hard compound tires on a strictly highway vehicle? It's not what I would do because the wet (i.e. cold) traction will be horrible.
Ideally you'd have three sets of tires: Cold / rain / snow, with soft compound and directional tread pattern, medium compound dense tread pattern summer highway tires, and hard compound open tread off road tires. I'm not even including soft compound dense tread, i.e. racing, tires because who goes around racing a 5500 lb truck. The Hankook tires mentioned above are probably in this latter category: They aren't bad tires, just the wrong tires for the application.
Whatever you get, keep an eye on the tread depth and wear profile. You can even get the tires spin balanced at the halfway wear point if you monitor and know when that is.
Also, don't judge any tire until you've scuffed the tread surface with about a hundred miles of ordinary driving. Handling and noise will both change dramatically as they break in.
The best tire for the road is, wait for it....one for off-road!!!
Great bit of advice for 1% of ML owners. [stupid emoji deleted]
This is a GL sub-forum, and Max runs one with lockers and low range. It's a very capable off-road truck. I was able to surprise myself with my GL's capability, and I have no EORP and was running street tires.
I now run Dick Cepek trail tires and am pleased with both the highway and off-road performance.
I'm sorry, but you don't know what you are talking about.
I'm sure your all-terrain tires are nice and quiet, grip excellent in cold/wet, handle and ride like a dream...on a Jeep. lol.
Even putting AT tires on an ML is a fail, putting crappy ones on is inexcusable.
I would take street tires off-road before I'd take off-road tires on the street. Do you track them too???
I would not think twice about taking my expanded off road package GL on these wranglers on a cross country drive to and on the Washington back country discovery route. (Wabdr). Will I go rock crawling through Panamint into Death Valley in it? Probably not, but I did once in a stock ‘00 4Runner on yoko geolandars and I didn’t die. You don’t need an overly aggressive block tire for anything but mud puddles.
like I said, they’ve got good traction for what they are - an all around tire that also does great off road.
even a normal GL without the off road package is surprisingly capable off road with an off-road or trail type tire due to the synthetic locker feature of the ESP system and the very low ratio granny first gear of the 7g transmission.
E Coupe C207, ML W166, ML W164, Sprinter 1500/144, W111 SB220 Fintail(s), A5 chassis Beetle 5+5
lol, I'm sure you know what a good street tire is, that's why you bought an off-road tire.
Newsflash: Nobody buys a GL for off-road. Suggesting owners who never go off-road should buy off-road tires is bad advice.
This is just hilarious.
Like I said, a street tire off-road is smarter than a off-road tire on the street.....where you might have to stop on wet, want good gas mileage, prefer a quiet ride and maintain some fuel economy and generally deal with traffic at high speed. Do those tires look like they are for high-speed wet? That's that most dangerous driving condition, but you want to hobble yourself for some reason.
That's really smart, and maybe it helps your ego, thinking it's "tough" to "look" off-roady...you might actually need that as part of your life, but as advice....wow.
Wranglers/Dick Cepek on a Mercedes are a FAIL. Did you put KC lights on it too? You might have to take your baby sister-in-law in the middle of the night.
No, I'm sure the knobby-mud tires are ideal for the average ML/GL owner, as long as they don't mind the roar of the tread, sloppy handling and lack of grip ON THE ROAD at full speed where other vehicles exist, lol. BUT according to you guys they are just as good as highly developed street tires in those aspects....you are "satisfied", subjectively, without a direct comparison. If you did directly compare them, you find something like: Noise = 1 Handling = 2 Grip = 3 where a street tire would be more like: Noise = 9 Handling = 9 Grip = 10 but you are unable to admit it.
Choice-supportive bias or post-purchase rationalization is the tendency to retroactively ascribe positive attributes to an option one has selected and/or to demote the forgone options.[1] It is part of cognitive science, and is a distinct cognitive bias that occurs once a decision is made. For example, if a person chooses option A instead of option B, they are likely to ignore or downplay the faults of option A while amplifying or ascribing new negative faults to option B. Conversely, they are also likely to notice and amplify the advantages of option A and not notice or de-emphasize those of option B.
Audi, I'm reading through this latter conversation and it seems like you're focused on proving YOUR opinion is correct. Tire choice is 100% opinion based as there is no such thing as a "best" tire. It's all about trade-offs. On top of that, it's still choice based. Saying things like "nobody" buys a GL to go off-roading is just plain wrong. It's a very capable off-road vehicle and while most stay on the blacktop, there's still plenty of people around the world that use it's capabilities off-road. Some go hard core, some do it more light-duty - there's a whole lot of "grey area" when it comes to off roading... which is where something like an AT tire would be a perfect fit for some people.
As far as anybody saying that a pure "on-road" tire is just as good as an AT tire... NOBODY here is saying that - they're saying that for them, even though the on-road performance isn't at the same level, they are happy with it, especially given that they can have a little more fun off-road. And, why can't someone put an AT tire on a GL? Isn't that their prerogative? Again, trade-offs. There is no one best answer.
In truth, and I don't mean to sound crass, but they only thing we "learned" today is that you seem to like to argue more than you do respecting other people's opinions.
I don't understand. What is it about tires that brings out the antagonistic fool? LED headlights used to do the same, but those guys have disappeared.
Nobody buys the GL for off road? Well, I didn't, but I took mine off road and decided I'd been thinking about the truck wrong. I bought trail tires and love going off road. Most people who buy the GL don't go off road, but then again neither do most Jeep owners, even those that bought a Rubicon. The x164 has a nice torquey V8, with a good low 1st gear; the lucky ones who got an EORP can go pretty much anywhere, mostly just hampered by the long wheelbase and lower ground clearance. It's a respectable adventure wagon; I can sleep in the back, which I couldn't do with a F150. In a two day off road clinic in Anza Borrego, I couldn't get the GL stuck; in one sandy wash I had to be coached through taking a couple of runs at the sand bank - and I was running performance tires with soft compound and a dense directional tread pattern. We did an exercise of recovery off a sand berm, and I had to actually park it because I would have gotten over.
So if you don't care about off road performance, certainly don't get trail, or dedicated off road, tires. But it's just weird to be an *** mocking those who do. Audi Junkie must be lots of fun at parties.
E Coupe C207, ML W166, ML W164, Sprinter 1500/144, W111 SB220 Fintail(s), A5 chassis Beetle 5+5
I don't care what set of twisted priorities leads someone to put a mud tire on their Mercedes. I do care what works for me, and a tire that's terrible....except for off-road would be a joke for me.
Does it look like I just drove 1000 miles off-road?
Again, who said anything about driving their GL off-road, the original poster? No, nobody wants to go off-road except a few of you ding-dongs who have already made up their justifications. The problem lies in giving TERRIBLE advice to a guy who wants do do some normal driving in his GL. How hard is that for you to comprehend? Tricycle-AT tires, Baby Carriage- AT tires, Forklift- AT tires.... see how you sound?
If this were a Jeep forum, possibly an AT/MT tire suggestion would pass. I just selected some for my SiL's Jeep...she aint' even going off-road, lol.
I'm only confused why people clomp around on those tires instead of just changing to an off-road set specifically for that type of recreational activity....it's not even proper driving! I change tire/wheel sets all the time. Because of winter, my wife has FOUR sets, including the awesome Nexen Winguard Sport 2. I'm not afraid of the effort involved in swapping them over. I'm sure most of the guys here could do it too, if they maybe start with 10 push-ups every day for a while first. I have only 2 sets for my ML it's been less than a month of ownership, but can count up 6 1/2 extra wheel sets here total....but you guys with one single retarded set are going to lecture me, lol.
E Coupe C207, ML W166, ML W164, Sprinter 1500/144, W111 SB220 Fintail(s), A5 chassis Beetle 5+5
Originally Posted by eric_in_sd
I don't understand. What is it about tires that brings out the antagonistic fool? LED headlights used to do the same, but those guys have disappeared.
So if you don't care about off road performance, certainly don't get trail, or dedicated off road, tires. But it's just weird to be an *** mocking those who do. Audi Junkie must be lots of fun at parties.
You must be fun at remedial reading and comprehension lessons.
Did the OP ask for your opinion on off-road tires or say he wanted to go off-road? Try to stick with the subject. Maybe start a thread for off-roading and tires. Be sure to explain what the point of off-roading is....are you handicapped and unable to walk-hike without your "Big Boy Toy" to cart your fat *** around everyplace?
Did the OP ask for your opinion on off-road tires or say he wanted to go off-road?
Threads tend to morph into different discussions over time. Besides, I'm willing to be that the OP is capable of speaking for himself. Who knows, maybe he never thought of doing some off-roading and appreciated the tangent discussion? Maybe not - but one never knows and it was simply a fun conversation - or at least it started out that way.
Not for nothing, but he did thank everyone for the initial discussion and specifically stated that he bought tires. 5 days later, you brought this thread back up to give him some recommendations for tires but you must not have read the discussion before doing that since you would have known that he already had tires.
And... the name calling, insinuations and, quite honestly, putting people down for expressing THEIR opinions (of which tire choice is 100% opinion) isn't very attractive.
E Coupe C207, ML W166, ML W164, Sprinter 1500/144, W111 SB220 Fintail(s), A5 chassis Beetle 5+5
Also, the term "poser" comes to mind. It's been a long time since I used that one, but it's apt.
Some people swap out tires for the track, but not for off-roading. I wonder what the difference is??? I sort of think guys with the big rugged tough-guy tires want everyone to see them and infer things about the driver....even if it is just Starbux drive-thru.
03-22-2021, 03:38 AM
