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Need better tires than stock on my 2019 X?
- Thread starter rdpar
- Start date
Discount Tires, Tire Rack, many options. I had the continental tires and got 40,000 before I had to replace them as two had tread separation, but otherwise were quiet and comfortable and put on another set of the same due to a large discount. Many here have gone with ordering tires from Tire Rack and having them delivered to local shops for mounting.
KentuckyX
Member
I purchased these recently. More than half the price of the stock Continentals and, so far, I'm very impressed with them. Nexen Tire › I got them on eBay for $571 and paid another $60 to have them balanced and mounted. Sold by a company called Custom Wheel Outlet.
Nexens are surprisingly good IMO. I haven’t replaced our X’s tires yet, but they’ll be a candidate.
I had Nexens on a GMC Acadia years ago - they were the first non-Goodyears in the Acadia’s size - and I was duly impressed. Local tire shop recommended them; shame they retired about 2 years ago.
Edited to add: We’re on the factory tires on our X. Picked it up at end of June 2020, and have 16k miles on it. Here’s the current tread depths. Guessing we’re about halfway there.
KentuckyX
Member
KentuckyX
Member
There is the Roadian (which I have) and the N'fera. The Roadian is a newer design from Nexen, so I went with those. They're 70k mile tires, though I doubt very seriously if they'll last that long. For the price, I'll settle for half that.
The Roadians are what I had on the GMC. That was ~2012 or so. Wore like iron and drove really well - solid as could be in bad weather. Zero complaints from me, aside from being hard(-ish) to find.
The Model X loaner that I received from my Tesla Service Center during my last visit was outfitted with Nexens. They were quiet and more efficient than the Continentels on my X. I only drove them for a couple of hundred miles but they were impressive... and come to find they are available at Walmart at $150/tire ordered for the Roadian GTXs.
For a $100K car, who wants to shop Walmart for their tires?
For a $100K car, who wants to shop Walmart for their tires?
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KentuckyX
Member
I hear ya'. I didn't relish the thought of buying mine off eBay, but I have a great local installer and the tires have turned out to be a smart purchase. They arrived here via FedEx 2 days after I purchased them.
24000 miles on a 400+hp, 5500lb car with staggered tires that are asked to function from 0 to 120 degrees, and 0 to 155mph, with low rolling resistance, isn't a bad result, believe it or not. Compounding/constructing a tire for such a wide range of operating conditions is hard. I've had OE all season tires on German cars last half as long. The OEM is designing for a lot of edge cases that most people don't really need, so a cheaper, non-OE tire isn't always going to do those things as well, but if it's good enuogh for you in your daily drive, who cares? The Nexens seem like a great deal for that situation.
The SC by me is pretty close to matching Tirerack.com's pricing (On OE replacements obviously), so that's at least not a total ripoff. Usually the rule is "the dealer service center charges twice as much as a tire shop to install the same tire"
The SC by me is pretty close to matching Tirerack.com's pricing (On OE replacements obviously), so that's at least not a total ripoff. Usually the rule is "the dealer service center charges twice as much as a tire shop to install the same tire"
lol what? I'm no fan of walmart but, don't shop at walmart if you don't want to save money? I guess? I paid more for my tires at Nordstrom seems like a weird flex
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Wasn’t my post but I do my level best to *never* shop at Walmart. I’ll pay a little more elsewhere to avoid them - I don’t like their business model or how they treat their suppliers, so I choose to spend elsewhere. Doing what I do for a living, business and supply chain ethics matter to me. It’s not a “flex” (Glad I have a teenager to translate that for me) but a personal statement against their business.
KentuckyX
Member
An update for anyone considering the Nexen Roadian GTX tires -- after a few thousand miles and 4 or 5 long trips, I'm very satisfied with these tires in all aspects. On my most recent 800 mile trip, I ended up at 334 wh/mi in 40 degree temps + some rain. Very quiet and comfortable and they handled the wet roads with ease.
I think the Continentals kind of suck, to use a technical term. Not sure why Tesla uses them. I like three season/performance tires and then winter tires for November through February in mid Atlantic. All season just don’t have the best grip when it rains and they’re woeful in winter. Sort of mediocre in order to work in “all seasons”.
That's great news on the Nexens. Road noise can be so subjective because which frequencies each person feels are obtrusive can be different. It'd be cool to get together 3-4 different X's and do a real-world back-to-back test on the same car same day same route. If you believe Tire rack's testing, even the worst swing is a tmost about 6% from worst to best rolling resistance for the same tire/same category testing they've done. Of course putting a mud tire in the same size on would be a different story.
The Nexen GTX is H-rated (130mph) in our sizes. That's plenty of speed rating. Who's going to spend an 10 minutes at 130mph or more in a Model X in the US (that's the design criteria for marking a tire at a given speed rating - 10 minutes at max rated MPH at max loading) Anybody want to raise their hand?
This is why. Continental is not bad at tires. The T0 tires were designed specifically for this car, this model, it was a one-off custom job. Tesla, and most companies, don't just grab off the rack, espceially not on niche vehicles. I know some of the people who do this work for a living (a couple of them might even lurk on here as I think a few are Tesla owners) and the differences within a model line, same brand, same size even, of the "same" tire, can be huge. You can't expect a tire designed to do *everything* to be great at *anything* - but Conti OE fitment tires are the closest thing I've come across that are *ok* at everythign they're asked to do, in my decades of destroying OE tires as fast as possible so I could put something "better" on to "save" money, heh
In particular, compounding a stable, reasonably effective at sub-zero temperatures tire, for a car that weighs as much as a full-size pickup truck, yet can put more energy into the tire than any pickup truck thanks to a 35 mph+ higher top speed, AND a 6800+lb GVWR - that's not easy stuff. That's like, bordering airplane levels of operating window (check out a Twin Beech's specs and tire cost, for instance!)
But like I said, most people aren't going to tax the limits of the tires, and a cheaper tire that hasn't been rigorously tested on the actual vehicle in all of those edge cases is probably almost always going to be just fine.
I'm reminded of the reviled Bridgestone RE92 which came on innumerable subarus. Forum people spent pages and paging absolutely dunking on that tire. "Real Subaru Enthusiasts" hated it with a burning passion so deep and pure that nothing could overcome it. You'd buy yourself a WRX, this car that you'd been playing in video games and made supercar-killing numbers from a stop for a few hundred bucks in mods, and had to put up with these greasy, squishy, lumps of all-season garbage?!?! The pitchforks and torches were a sight to behold.
So I gave them the sideye when my wife's '05 Legacy GT came on them, and desperately tried to kill them quickly (which didn't work, because AWD). Yet our use of that car, as an all weather all-round fail-safe vehicle, they were great tires. They didn't do anything very well, but they did everything, and that was enough.
The Nexen GTX is H-rated (130mph) in our sizes. That's plenty of speed rating. Who's going to spend an 10 minutes at 130mph or more in a Model X in the US (that's the design criteria for marking a tire at a given speed rating - 10 minutes at max rated MPH at max loading) Anybody want to raise their hand?
Richbot said:
This is why. Continental is not bad at tires. The T0 tires were designed specifically for this car, this model, it was a one-off custom job. Tesla, and most companies, don't just grab off the rack, espceially not on niche vehicles. I know some of the people who do this work for a living (a couple of them might even lurk on here as I think a few are Tesla owners) and the differences within a model line, same brand, same size even, of the "same" tire, can be huge. You can't expect a tire designed to do *everything* to be great at *anything* - but Conti OE fitment tires are the closest thing I've come across that are *ok* at everythign they're asked to do, in my decades of destroying OE tires as fast as possible so I could put something "better" on to "save" money, heh
In particular, compounding a stable, reasonably effective at sub-zero temperatures tire, for a car that weighs as much as a full-size pickup truck, yet can put more energy into the tire than any pickup truck thanks to a 35 mph+ higher top speed, AND a 6800+lb GVWR - that's not easy stuff. That's like, bordering airplane levels of operating window (check out a Twin Beech's specs and tire cost, for instance!)
But like I said, most people aren't going to tax the limits of the tires, and a cheaper tire that hasn't been rigorously tested on the actual vehicle in all of those edge cases is probably almost always going to be just fine.
I'm reminded of the reviled Bridgestone RE92 which came on innumerable subarus. Forum people spent pages and paging absolutely dunking on that tire. "Real Subaru Enthusiasts" hated it with a burning passion so deep and pure that nothing could overcome it. You'd buy yourself a WRX, this car that you'd been playing in video games and made supercar-killing numbers from a stop for a few hundred bucks in mods, and had to put up with these greasy, squishy, lumps of all-season garbage?!?! The pitchforks and torches were a sight to behold.
So I gave them the sideye when my wife's '05 Legacy GT came on them, and desperately tried to kill them quickly (which didn't work, because AWD). Yet our use of that car, as an all weather all-round fail-safe vehicle, they were great tires. They didn't do anything very well, but they did everything, and that was enough.
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