brad@tirerack.com

The tire is our #2 selling performance all season (it was #1 for a LONG time) with almost 20 million miles reported. That's a huge amount of feedback. For the record, as a percentage of sales volume standpoint we have not seen any more DWS tires go bad than any other performance all season we sell. Most of the out of round situations we have seen from them have arisen from being over driven and allowed to get too hot. If that happens, thing will start to go bad with them. Care has to be taken with tires like this, especially at full tread depth. They will squirm and generate heat from lateral movement.

I'm not implying you over-drove them, only that it is easy to do. While I am sorry the tires underperformed your expectations so badly, I am glad they stepped up, replaced them, and tried to make you happy.

nhdoc

I assure you that my driving habits were not the cause of the tire failures. I'm not "driving this car like I stole it", if anything we probably are the most docile of 911 drivers.

The replacement tires have proven the fact that the cause of the trouble was the tires and since the Contis had some vibration from mile 1 I conclude they were faulty from the beginning.

I did find it curious that you did not even address the issue of why reviews are censored which could both skew your scores and affect the popularity of a particular tire (thus causing it to be #1 or #2). I'm glad to hear you don't see a disproportionate number of reported failures of the DWS tires but it would be nice to see a disclaimer that warns people about the nature of "edited reviews" which might not shine a particularly good light on a popular tire. I'm not saying you don't publish any negative reviews because there are some but what I am saying is the site implies you publish all reviews, both negative and positive and I can only assume that those which are not published are probably overwhelmingly negative and therefore will skew the results towards positive which would certainly have an effect on which tires are "most popular".

ble2011

I bought these because of price. Not expecting much, but was impressed. Great tires in my opinion.

User 040621

It's a conspiracy I tell ya!

C2 Turbo

Hey Damon,

Quick question.. I put a set of 275/35/18 on the rear of my wife's '07 530 last year and I just received a call from my dealer that the rears are already at 3/32

I think she has barely put 20,000 miles on the tires (all highway miles), so is this normal? The front ones are still at 7/32.

Hard to believe the rears are already done.

Can you comment on their tread life ? The wear on the tires are even and they look fine besides the tread.

Thanks

Kevinmacd

Mitch9000 - Hankooks are not from China! They are from S Korea.
Take a look at the test done by Car and Driver!

http://www.caranddriver.com/comparis...mparison-tests

tarbender

NHDOC does raise good point about TireRack publishing reviews. I have used the reviews in the past and do take into account the feedback provided. I assumed that all reviews whether good or bad were presented. Now I know they are not. I suppose people are more likely to post a review when its is negative as opposed to when it is positive which gives an overall inaccurate review.

eflight

I lost a bit of respect for Tire Rack when I saw Damon's post defending the tire they sell without any mention of thier review policy.

User 040621

do you seriously think that all reviews can be published? do you that think that any review would be published before review? do you think that web page updates are made real time? there's lead time needed to get content from the submitters computer to the website.

every interaction - without exception - i've had with tire rack has been professional and above board.

Kevin - my China rubbish comments are a long standing part of my signature and were not directed specifically at Hankook.

SpeedBump

I have no idea what the deal is with your review but there are reviews of the tire with ratings of 0,1,1.5, 2.11 on tirerack so people are allowed to rate them poorly if they wish. Several of them talking about vibration and saying they are the worst tires they ever bought.

nhdoc

As I said, I know they do publish SOME negative reviews, just not ALL of them (at least not mine). Mine was not a rant or some psychotic vendetta against Conti, it simply told the story of my experiences in an honest and straightforward manner, as I did in my initial post here. I know they have published some other reviews since mine so I can only conclude they read mine and for whatever reason decided NOT to publish it and simply continue to publish those they feel are "worthy".

Kevinmacd

mitch9000 - point taken

strato58

Just put for hankooks on my 997 turbo...2 were out of round on the roadforce balancer...they sent me 2 new tires that are perfect. Roadforce balance is a must to find defective tire.

edfishjr

Similar experience, but...
I've bought a lot of tires from Tirerack over the years. Everything is great, unless you get bad tires. If you get bad Michelin's from Tirerack (like I did) you will have to work very hard to get them to allow you to send them back and go to another brand. (Like the OP, I wanted nothing to do with more of them. I'd wanted Conti DWs but they couldn't be had, so I'd tried Michelins instead!) Even then, they wanted me to pay for all the extra shipping and wouldn't even discuss paying for the extra mounting and balancing I was out. In the end, they paid most, but not all of the extra shipping (after a lot of jawboning) and I was out all the extra mounting and balancing. I told Tirerack that I didn't understand why I should be out cash money because of a defective product they sold me. They claimed they couldn't do anything more than what the Michelin warranty allowed. I'm still of the opinion that this is rubbish and I told them that neither they nor Michelin was standing behind the product. I recommended they stop carrying such a poor quality tires with such a poor warranty. I'm sure they thought I was crazy.

They were nice enough to send me a note a couple of months later that informed me that the tires had been examined and they agreed they were defective! Like I needed that confirmation. My tire installer would spin one by hand on his balancer and you see it trying to jump off each time a huge bulge came by. Another one (never run on the road!) the tread would dip on one side and raise up on the other. There cannot be any final quality check at Michelin or such tires could never be passed. They must just depend on their process. Something goes screwey with the process, bad tires get shipped. Maybe all are this way, I don't know.

Edward 96 Viper GTS

Tire rack will try to weasel out of any responsibility on all their products. We bought expensive cryogenically treated brakes from them. They warped immediately. Tirerack said my wife abused them while driving, but she only drives in local traffic. Load of bull____ from tire rack. Avoid at all costs. Buy local from reputable companies, not sell today, who are you tomorrow guys.
Ed