Driving Is Again a Pleasure

Yesterday the nice people at the Les Schwab Tire Center in Bremerton installed four new tires on my 15-year-old Toyota Tacoma. And while my pickup doesn’t drive like a new truck, the ride improved so much that driving is again a pleasure.

I have owned the truck since it was new and have always gotten a lot of miles out of its tires. If you include the rubber it came with, yesterday’s purchase is only the Tacoma’s third set of tires since it left the factory 168,000 miles ago. While that saves money, it turns out you can put too many miles on a set of tires. Or at least try to.

The factory tires lasted 94,000 miles. Their replacements had gone 74,000 miles. I knew I would need new tires soon, but since the old ones still had tread remaining, I figured they were good for a few more miles. That wasn’t the case.

A few weeks ago the steering wheel started vibrating every time I drove the truck. The vibration was most noticeable at low speeds. It seemed to smooth out a bit, but not completely, on the freeway. When I say “vibrate,” I mean it would shake up and down unless I gripped it firmly. If I removed my hands from the steering wheel, the truck steered toward the right even though it has never had alignment problems before.

Clearly there was a serious issue. Things were so bad that I dreaded driving the truck, not a good situation with your daily driver.

The technician at Les Schwab diagnosed the problem as soon as I explained why I was there. “The treads have separated from the inner belts or are starting too,” he said. He confirmed this by putting the truck on a lift and examining each tire as he spun it in place. Then he showed me what was going on.

The tread anomalies were most noticeable on the front tire on the driver’s side. Part of the tread was cupped, making the outer edge concave instead of convex. On the opposite side, a tumor-like bulge protruded from the tread, an indicator that the tread is about to separate. I’m thankful it didn’t happen a few nights ago when I was driving home from Treasure Island in the rain.

The whole thing makes me seem careless. I do plead guilty to not getting the tires regularly checked and rotated. I took them in to the dealer ever 5000 miles for their first 45,000 miles, but slacked off after that. Every time I checked the tires myself, I didn’t see anything wrong. Yet when the technician pointed out the imminent tread separation, the signs were obvious.

So live and learn. And don’t try to get too many miles out of a set of tires. Besides, new ones will greatly improve the ride.