I've been reading how everyone seems to dislike the OEM tires delivered with their new TL. For the most part I've been ignoring the threads pertaining to the dires, howerver I have to say that after reading the blurb about them on TireRack:

http://www.tirerack.com/tires/tires....l=Turanza+EL42

That Acura made a strange decision in delivering these poor tires on a 30+K Sedan.

 

Agreed - especially given the differing climates. I told my father who is 74 about the flatspotting tire issue and he said he fell into a time warp because back in the day all his cars had that issue with the nylon in the tires.

 

Strange thing is that I was browsing the other tires which fit the Acura OEM rims, and the majority of them would be probably more than acceptable on the TL. I'm sure their decision was based on money. However my wife's 04 Maxima came in with Goodyear Eagles, so Acura needs to find a new tire partner.

Also, lest you forget, Bridgestone is owned by Firestone which had a major problem a few years back with some Ford products. I'm sure you remember all those law suites pertaining to the tread flying off.

In my Pop's opinion (he used to make tires when he was much younger and lived in Akron where they were all mostly made) he always claimed that Firestones were crap.

And I've never had a bridgestone that was worth its cost either.

 

When I talked to a Bridgestone company store manager about the flat spots, he said it was not normal, and HE had NOT heard of flat spoting in the cold since Bias Ply tires (your dad is right)!

Unfortunatley there is a trend of tire makers to switch back to nylon for high speed rated tires.

BTW - the BMW 7 series comes standard with the EL-42's (and uses nylon, but swaps the polyester in the TL tires for Rayon) - this is for the stock 245/50-18 tires

 

Firestone is owned by Bridgestone, not the other way around. Surprising that you don't like the Bridgestone, since their S-03/S-02 has been the top street performance tire for some time now.

The $30-45k range is a difficult one for manufacturers. Buyers want the features of $60k cars (5-series, E-series) for the price of family sedans (Camry, Accord).So there are tradeoffs. Use of $20 OEM tires is one example. Thin leather is another. The cheap plastic in a G35 is yet another. BMW gives you very small cars in that price range, as does Audi.

Honda did a great job with their trade-offs in the Acura. But thin leather (see cracking thread), poor speaker placement (top of dash, see speaker thread), cheap tires (see numerous threads), hard plasitc around the glove box (see rattling threads), no fold down rear seat, no RWD/AWD, fake wood/carbon are all tradeoffs. Good tires, leather, real wood, speakers in doors, vents doors, more soft touch materials, etc. would have made this a $40-45k car (note production costs are about 30% or MSRP).

 

Nissan learned after having and still having problems with Bridgestone tires on the 00-03 Maxima and 350(which still has them). 02-03 Maxima GLE's have the Turanzas and they have had alot of vib/flat spot issues with them and the SE has the Potenzas lots of vib and flat spot issues as well. My 350 and 03 MaxSE had issues with this as well but know its taken care of.

 

I wouldn't pay a huge amount of attention to the owner ratings section on tire rack. There's an obvious problem with the way the tires are rated by owners, if you look at comparisons between tires.

In the real world, most tires will be very good in some respects and not so good in others. But in the owners' ratings, if a tire is good in a few areas, it almost always is rated excellent across the board. Same with "bad" tires. You just don't see many tires rated as excellent in traction, braking, etc. then very poor in ride and noise. That would be the reality for a lot of tires. But instead, tire owners are so impressed with their purchase that the give the tires excellent marks in areas where they aren't deserved, and vice versa for tires where they aren't impressed.

Even the lowly EL42, in reality, would probably equal or beat out the best all-season tires in a couple of categories (maybe noise or ride or something). I'm not defending the EL42 tires, or Acura's choice of this tire. I've just noticed that the tire rack ratings section isn't something that contains objective information. (But I'd still lean strongly to the tires rated the highest in my purchase, but obtain other input from more objective tests or sources, even Tire Rack's own performance tests).

 

From a subjective perspective, the tirerack reviews are startling. The EL42s come out with an average rating of around 2.8, where most other tires worth considering average around 8 (scale of -10). I give the subjective opinions of actual consumers a lot more credit than you do, and it is this specific data that helped me to get my michelin pilot sports for free.

 

Ok, so I dont know what I'm talking about. Howerver I got my point across. Regarding Bridgestone's "top street performance" tires, I have no knowledgeof them. Am I suprised that they have A good tire, no. Any mfg can proabably make a good (or even great) tire. My terms and/or comments are in general and not specific.

 

The tire for the TL was supposedly manufactured specifically for the car so I don't think you can draw any basic conclusions from other retail versions. My understanding is three manufacturers bid for the tire application and the tires were evaluated based on dry cornering performance. I now have a trial version of Blizzaks on that are pretty good.

 

When you say trial version, doe that mean that you have to give them back when the tires are redesigned?

 

I believe these are trial tires that Acura engineering is testing. The engineering group provided me with the rims and tires and took my old ones back. They will advise me when new tires are available and replace the tires and rims on my car. I am going to post a write-up on the tires I have in a separate post.

 

OK, this may be a dumb question, but why is Acura engineering testing "SNOW" tires? Tell them to fix the EL-42 problem first! Just my 2 cents, as I dont think they will offer snow tires as a factory option?

 

Hi, Peters,

I have the same as LED Master said.

Are you talking about your trial tires are EL42 BLIZZAK? They are not other Bridgestone's Blizzak, it's EL42's.

Thanks.

 

These are Blizzak WS50s, not EL42s. These are snow tires with an aggressive tread design. So far, they are outstanding: very good ride, modest road noise given their profile. Obviously, different tires change the ride characteristics significantly. These are softer, and I like that.

I believe these tires were on one of the fleet cars in engineering for winter driving. My tire/vibration problem became quite severe and to rectify the problem they provided me with these which were slightly used. I may have a different problem than just flatspotting than is reported in this forum, hence the different solution. It may be a combination of rim/tire peculiar to my car and the car became difficult to drive.

So, I got some used tires for now. They work fine and the car has no vibration problems.