Everything You Need to Know About All-Terrain Tires

If you want to take full advantage of the traction provided by your truck’s four-wheel-drive system, you need to run a tire designed to grip the surfaces you drive on. And if those include both paved and unpaved roads, the tire you’re looking for is an all-terrain. Let me save you a bunch of money, hassle, and headaches, and show you how to find the right one for your specific needs.To get more news about off road tire, you can visit gofortunetire.com official website.

What Is an All-Terrain Tire?
“An all-terrain tire is a jack of all trades, and a master of none,” says Todd Bergeson, the senior manager of product planning at Toyo Tires. Bergeson is responsible for engineering the tires my wife runs on her long-travel Land Cruiser, and he participated in the design of that vehicle—before joining Toyo, Bergeson worked as an engineer and product planner at Toyota. His résumé also includes other well-regarded 4x4s, like the 4Runner TRD Pro and the FJ Cruiser.

What Bergeson is getting at is that, while other tires may outperform all-terrains on snow, dirt, or pavement, nothing else is designed to work as well across all those surfaces.

Compared with a highway tire, an all-terrain tire will be equipped with a stronger bead (a ropelike ring that runs around the inner perimeter of the tire, holding it onto the wheel rim), tougher plies (the panels of steel or fabric mesh that lie under the rubber, adding strength and puncture resistance), as well as a rubber tread that’s thicker and designed to better withstand the cutting, tearing, and deformation caused by off-road surfaces. The pattern of that tread will also be designed to grip loose surfaces, while evacuating water, mud, small rocks, and snow as efficiently as possible.

Unfortunately, all those traits do come with some trade-offs. Compared with a highway tire, an all-terrain tire will be heavier and louder and won’t offer quite as much grip on pavement. Bergeson says that more new vehicles don’t come equipped with all-terrain tires for just those reasons. “Most drivers don’t actually use their 4x4s off-road,” he says. “And they still want their trucks to be competitive with other vehicles.”

Consumers who buy rugged SUVs or pickups with the expectation that they’ll drive like a luxury car or a sports car often dictate the tire choices made by car manufacturers. If you bought an SUV or a pickup truck with the expectation that you’ll be able to use it off-road and in winter weather, you’ll need to change those tires.
What’s the Right Size?
Larger tires will more easily roll over larger obstacles off-road. They also look cool. Unfortunately, larger tires will also reduce a vehicle’s effective gear ratio. As I wrote about at length in an article about people ruining their Tacomas, that can utterly destroy a vehicle’s fuel economy, performance, and off-road capability.
So if you’re switching from the 30.5-inch tire that comes standard on a Tacoma to a 34-inch tire, given the Taco’s 3.91 gears, that will give you a new effective ratio of 3.50 to 1. Your performance will decrease by 11 percent.

Again, using the same Taco example, switching from a 30.5-inch tire to a 34-inch one will reduce engine revolutions at 60 miles per hour from 1,500 to 1,345 revolutions per minute. That’s also an 11 percent difference. Take that into the real world and see how your engine and transmission perform at the different RPMs. Just remember that the effects of altering your final drive ratio with larger tires are compound; while your engine will be operating at lower RPMs at a given road speed, it will also have less power.

Wondering how much height a taller tire will add? Fortunately, that calculation is a lot easier. Simply divide the difference in tire diameters by half, and that will give you the increase in height that changing the tires alone will give you. This can be important in determining whether or not your truck will fit in your garage.

What I can’t give you a formula for is how well a larger tire will fit on your vehicle. For instance, mounting 34-by-10.5-inch BF Goodrich K02’s (which actually measure out at 33 inches) to my Ranger required a two-inch suspension lift, chopping off the wheel-crash bars, and using wheels that spaced the tires outboard. And they still rub at full lock in reverse. Every vehicle and every suspension setup will be different, and the skill of your alignment shop plays a role in tire fitment, too.