Ask an expert

How many km's would you expect from a new car tyre set at the correct tyre pressures and driven under normal urban/city conditions?

Specifically, a Toyota Yaris 1.5 purchased new in July 2007 and travelled 14,000 km's.

Henry

From the "Ask Jack" archives - 23 April 2010

The tyre life on a NZ new vehicle especially from a Japanese manufacturer, can be a lot different than a set of NZ manufactured new tyres in my experience.

All sounds confusing no doubt, but let me try and explain.

As there is no local production or assembly of cars in NZ, all vehicles sold new are sourced off shore and in the case of the Japanese, not all of their product range is assembled in Japan.

Components like tyres are therefore sourced from the local market in which the car is being assembled. They will be manufactured to meet more the local conditions, not the road surfaces the vehicles will encounter in the country of final destination.

NZ road surfaces are notoriously severe on tyres due to their course chip construction, some regions being worse than others. I believe our roads are called low initial cost but high maintenance but that's another story.

When NZ had local assembly of cars (up to the late 90's), tyres were supplied from the local manufacturers and were designed specifically for our conditions. This meant the tyres were designed to suppress as much road noise and be as hard wearing as possible as well as having good road holding characteristics in all conditions.

The bottom line therefore is; cars assembled in counties where the road surfaces are a lot smoother, generally have a lot shorter tyre life on our roads than an equivalent tyre manufactured and sold new in NZ.

I have heard of some tyres for small or medium sized cars only lasting around the 25,000km mark and in some extreme cases a bit less. Once the vehicles are fitted with NZ new or tyres more suited to our roads, then the distance before replacement can in many instances double.

I would certainly expect more than 14,000km's out of a set of tyres unless the vehicle is being driven in a very harsh environment.

It's in cases like this that you find how well you get looked after as a customer from some new vehicle distributors.

While it is unrealistic to expect tyres to be replaced at no cost when they have reached their used by date prematurely, some assistance toward the replacement cost can go a long way to restoring confidence in the product in my view.

Tyre wear should not be confused with safety either.

All cars sold new in NZ will have tyres which are not compromised on safety or road handling regardless of the road surface.