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Location: In a perfect world winter does not exist
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The quality of tires for the money currently is outstanding. I put 205 60 15 Cooper CS5 Grand touring tires on my car and the total was 291.00 after taxes, install, everything. Thats for 4. Awesome, smooth, quiet tires.
OP sounds like a milleniial complaining about the price of everything and with disregard for cost of how things are made. Tires are quite cheap if you consider inflation, the prices of tires have not gone up that much in the last 20 yrs.
I was paying $120/tire for Yokos Sports tires back in 2004. Same price today.
That's rather true, too. I guess I'm paying about twice as much for tires as I did on my first car in 1970, and they're even much larger tires...not to mention steel belted radials compared to POBP.
If you really think about it. You have a vehicle with all this new-fangled tech. ABS, stability control, high tech steering and suspension and brakes....
All of it must transmit to the pavement through the tires. You're sitting on roughly 300 sq inches of contact with the road. Do you really want to cheap out here?
One thing I have always wondered--why are tires for a car so freaking expensive? That has never made sense to me. $50-100 for a piece of rubber? Are you kidding me? That has got to be the most outrageously overpriced item there is. My goodness, a computer's CPU is the size of a dime and has probably a million wires thinner than human hair crammed into that tiny space, and yet as complicated as CPUs are, they don't cost as much as some car tires. That makes absolutely no sense to me. Frankly, I don't see why car tires should cost anymore than, say, $20, frankly, even if it's 17" tires for a 4 wheel drive or the higher-line tires for a sports car etc.
What gives? And why are people so accepting of this? People readily complain about the price of gas even if it goes up, say, 15 cents, but they happily shell out their kidneys almost for a freaking piece of rubber.
This is an old thread but I will take a bite.
The rubber you are driving around on is supposed to keep you safe. A CPU does not have the same requirement. I could not find any lawsuits related to CPU's causing a wreck while a car was in motion.
One thing I have always wondered--why are tires for a car so freaking expensive? That has never made sense to me. $50-100 for a piece of rubber? Are you kidding me? That has got to be the most outrageously overpriced item there is. My goodness, a computer's CPU is the size of a dime and has probably a million wires thinner than human hair crammed into that tiny space, and yet as complicated as CPUs are, they don't cost as much as some car tires. That makes absolutely no sense to me. Frankly, I don't see why car tires should cost anymore than, say, $20, frankly, even if it's 17" tires for a 4 wheel drive or the higher-line tires for a sports car etc.
What gives? And why are people so accepting of this? People readily complain about the price of gas even if it goes up, say, 15 cents, but they happily shell out their kidneys almost for a freaking piece of rubber.
A tire is a lot more complicated than a tennis shoe. It's also a lot larger. You probably don't think twice about paying $50 for a pair of tennis shoes, but a car tire has a lot more materials in it than a dozen tennis shoes.
The OP is a dreamer, thinking that tires are so high today. I was a 19 year old kid, when my dad bought me a gas station (I had worked in one through high school) to keep me from going to Alaska on a fishing boat for the summer. It was a Mobile station. They had a fantastic tire, that was guaranteed to last for 60,000 miles. Cost $60 each back then. So high quality tires, are cheap compared to cost of tires back then, taking the cost of living difference, and the wage differential between back then and today.
The OP has no idea, of what goes into the cost of tires. The cost for R&D to develop and improve tires is expensive. The factory that makes them, has a lot of overhead from costs of the building and equipment, cost of labor, cost of material, etc., etc. There is a lot more already in the cost of the tires before it leaves the factory. From there it is shipped to distributors, who sell them to auto dealers. To get them to the distributor cost a lot of shipping costs. Then the labor and warehouse and office space and showroom for the distributor costs considerable. Then they are again shipped to the dealers who sell them to the public, and that shipping is again expensive. Again a lot of costs to run the dealers business, including installing the tires on vehicles, and some fairly expensive equipment to pay for.. And those employees do not work for free. The factory has to make a profit to stay in business, and the distributor the same, and the same for the dealer.
Tires are not made by elves, and cost the dealers nothing to acquire them to sell to the public.
If it was possible someone could install tires at half the price they sell for today, they would get all the tire business and put all other companies and dealers out of business.
Ive thought about this before as well, you would think by now, someone would have created a tire that can last the life of the car, or even a semi-solid one, that doesnt have blow outs or leaks...
But then again, the tire industry relies on people buying tires every so often, so the industry can stay afloat and thrive.
Personally I think its crazy we still have vehicles with tires/ wheels, its 2018! We should have something like Lukes landspeeder in star wars by now (electromagnetic gravity control), although I can certainly understand why they would suppress technology like this too, these kinds of vehicles would not be very profitable for so any industries compared to vehicles today.
I have a heavy van, so I have to put LT-rated tires on it............them babies are spendy.
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