We had Coopers on out rig when we bought it, they were only about a year old from purchase date. (our rig is F350 7.3 PS with a Bigfoot 1500, so pretty heavy)
Two years into our ownership and we had massive sidewall cord separation on tire and signs of it happening on other tires. At that point the tires were only 4 years old by DOT date and maybe only 15K total miles on them.
We are pretty religious about checking tire pressures, but the truck does/did sit (We both WFH, even before the pandemic and we don’t daily drive it and the PO used it only as their RV as well)
We replaced them with E rated Wranglers(I don’t recall which specific Wrangler model,and they have been fine, we don’t expect 50K miles out of them, we just don’t get to get away that often, and I suspect the tires will be aged out before they are worn out. (Especially since we didn’t have a big trip this year with covid and all) so we decided to go for a more off-road AT+Snow focused tire.
In an abundance of caution we age out tires between 5-7 years depending on sidewall condition, regardless of remaining tread depth.
They are noisy but you can’t hear them over the 7.3 powersmoke so that’s a non-issue for us.
They are an-order-of-magnitude better compared to the Coopers off road, with a more compliant ride, way more traction. A downside, they do pick up a lot more gravel and toss it, so we are getting ready to add larger mud flaps, and we go slow when we leave gravel roads for pavement just to keep the tossed rocks from going too far. most of our off road mileage is forest service, fire and logging roads, with some high desert sandy wash. Not a lot of wheeling, but we do regularly air down when off road.
On road manners are pretty good for an AT 3-peak snowflake rated tire.
Mileage has stayed the same from the Coopers to these ones (15 mpg, loaded or unloaded)
Overall I’m happy with the Wranglers, but we were forced into buying them as that’s what the tire shop had in-stock in the type of tires we were looking for when we needed tires when the coopers went south.
The upside of this whole tire thing was that when we were trying to figure out what was wrong with the truck before knowing it was the tires we found that our steering dragbar was starting to age out so we were able to inspect that and get it fixed, and now we are keeping a much closer look at all the front suspension parts.
On our Tacoma (which only has a topper) we last ran Hankook Dynapro (same tire size as we run on the Ford) and when they were new they were decent tires but as they aged they became much worse, and their really stiff sidewall really sent the stock Prerunner suspension into fits. when they got past 70% of tread life they got really sketchy with unpredictable oversteer (and that’s with the very anemic V6 automatic that is stock in an 03 Tacoma Prerunner)
Those tires were replaced with the the stock BFGoodrich TA II
A tire that’s a lot louder vs the Hankooks but like the wranglers they offer much better off road performance. (which is what we wanted as we shifted the taco away from freeway trips and towing, to more off road exploring.)
We did notice the softer sidewall really improved the handling of the Tacoma.
I’ve not needed to air them down yet so I can’t give input in that area, but the first set of tires were fine aired down.
