Why tire rotation is important?: So you might have heard about this saying that rotating the tires from the front to the rear at a certain interval would help you prolong your tire life. Let’s have a look at this closely and see whether rotating your tires is actually good for your tire life or it is just a marketing gimmick from the tire shop.
Apart from BMW & 4×4 trucks, most of cars sold currently in Malaysia is a front wheel drive vehicle. This mean that the tires in the front actually provides traction for the whole vehicle to propel forward. The rear tires are merely free rolling as they are drag by the front tires. Resultant from this configuration, the tire in the front has to do more work against the tire surface compare to the rear tire. As the torque is being generated in the front tires, the abrasion of the front tire is much higher.
So lets assume you start of with 4 new sets of tires. After 10,000km of mileage , there will be a significant tread depth difference between the front and rear tire. The concept of rotation would be to swap the rear tires to the front as they have a much higher tread depth. Doing this at a good timing interval will help you balance the tread depth of both the front & rear tires. So effectively, all 4 tires are wearing down evenly through out a long period. However, in comparison if you are not rotating, your front tires will continue to wear quicker than the rear tires and there will be a point you need to replace your 2 front tires at a much earlier stage. This is illustrated with the table below:
| Car 1 | Car 2 | ||||||
| front | rear | KM | front | rear | rotate front | rotate rear | |
| 9 | 9 | 0 | 9 | 9 | |||
| 7 | 8 | 10,000 | 7 | 8 | –> | 8 | 7 |
| 5 | 7 | 20,000 | 6 | 6 | <– | 6 | 6 |
| 3 | 6 | 30,000 | 4 | 5 | –> | 5 | 4 |
| 1 | 5 | 40,000 | 3 | 3 | <– | 3 | 3 |
The table above was calculated with a simple assumption that the wear rate of the front tires is 2mm/10,000km while the rear tire wear rate is 1mm/10,000km. Obviously in a real life scenario, the wear rate is highly depending on a lot of factors such as driving behavior and road conditions. Car 1 does not rotate its tires while car 2 keeps rotating its tires after every interval. Doing some simple arithmetic calculations @ 40,000 km interval, car 2 still have 3mm on both the front & rear tires while car 1 is forced to change its front tire as it has less than the legal requirement (1.6mm)
From the analysis done, it can be seen that there is clear advantage rotating your tires. How much value you could extract from it depends on your front & rear tires wear rate. Do note that it cost time & money to rotate your tires as you would need to redo your balancing but in my humble opinion the risk benefit is in favor of rotating your tires.