The Australian tyre industry is at once Dickensian and hi-tech. Nobody in their right mind could argue with the sheer technical capability of the product. Modern, premium tyres are extremely impressive things, even though they all still suffer from the stigma of looking profoundly black and round. Visually they’re carbon (or more recently silica) copies of one another; it’s the underlying complexity that must be appreciated – and most customers don’t get it.
Modern tyres have done more than any other automotive component to improve the capability of the platforms that ride upon them. No matter how impressive the hardware is – those extra kilowatts, those even more powerful brake systems – it’s tyres that translate the potential into actual performance. It’s a big job, too, and often taken for granted. This is one of the reasons why the sadly burgeoning trade in cheapie retreads for performance tyre carcasses often sees young blokes on a budget go rapidly from ‘fully sick’ to profoundly injured, in an ambulance.
But here’s the Dickensian part of the tyre-buying deal: If you’re a consumer, the whole aftermarket tyre retailing structure might as well be coal-fired and steam-powered. In the course of researching this, the sixth Wheels tyre test, I mystery-shopped eight tyre retailers randomly by telephone, inquiring after the best replacement tyre for a hypothetical two-year-old SS Commodore. How many different recommendations did I get? Seven. And five of my telephone advisors appeared to be playing their game with significantly less than half a deck. Some of that advice was totally off with the fairies, based on everything we’ve learned from the five previous tyre tests. It’s a bleak old marketplace if you’re looking for advice.
Accurate, independent assessment of tyres just doesn’t exist except on these pages. Perversely, the tyre industry rather likes it that way. There’s a cultural cringe among some tyre manufacturers, many of whom would rather open a vein than offer up their products to independent review or, worse, competitor comparison. Some would rather stick with forging perception via marketing campaigns – without any pesky, apple-cart-upsetting intervention from criticisms drawn using objective data.
It’s simple enough to join the dots separating that last paragraph from the list of premium tyres tested this year. All the premium tyre makers were invited to participate, and some declined. If there’s one finding we’ve reported in the five previous Wheels tyre tests, it’s that there are small differences in performance between premium tyres, and a major gulf back to the discount bottom-feeders. In effect, we’ve been spruiking one key message for six years – buy premium tyres, not cheapies. Me? I’d be asking myself how smart it would be to buy something that a manufacturer wasn’t prepared to see put through its paces against its key competitors, in tightly controlled objective tests.