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I’d like to hear some comments (this may open up for far too many!) on tires you find suitable for your rig for daily and off road driving.
I’ve got an F250 short bed with a NS Laredo TC. The original tires are Goodyear Wrangler AT. Only 30,000 miles on them, and they are ready to come off as treadwear indicator shows. Though we’ve traveled a good number of miles on some pretty rough road, I think 30,000 is too little a number for tire life.
One tire got a small rock embedded in it up on the Dempster Highway. I plugged it and it has added 15000 miles since the plug was put it. That in consideration I guess that tire has done OK. But now the tire its rubber is flaking off!
I wonder if there’s a better choice than the Wranglers.
Hope to hear a few thoughts. Thanks.
Good question. We published a detailed review of these all-terrain tires for truck camper rigs here:
We are completely sold on the Cooper Discoverer AT3-XLT tires. Here’s our recent review.
Thanks Mike.
Hmm I’ve now read a bunch of reviews on the Cooper and they seem favorable.
I just wonder why on Discount Tire they list it as Better and not Best?It gets 4.8 out 5 from Discount’s reviews and 95.8% recommend it so that kind of talks in favor of the tire in my opinion. It’s hard to compare anything really, so many variables –
vehicle, driver, usage, loads…I was researching tires to replace my factory Goodyear Wranglers on my 2017 F-350, and came across Michelin Agilis Cross-Climate tires. I find the Tire Rack website a great resource for reviews and comparisons, and found these tires to be their highest rated, so I bought them. I have only about 2000 km on them, but they seem to have less rolling resistance than the Wranglers – the truck feels like it has more power, and seems to get better fuel economy. These tires are winter-rated (snowflake emblem). I’m very happy with them.
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.Squish,
The Cooper Discoverer AT3-XLT tires have come a long way in the 20 years since you had yours go south. I’ve had a couple sets of them for my TC and for our 2011 Grand Cherokee.
When we first started using them in 2012, they were very quiet until you got down to the last 25% of tread, at which time they began to sing in a poco a poco crescendo.
I think they had a lot of complaints about that.
The next generation of Disco AT3-XLT’s solved that problem.
I’ve had one flat, a blowout on our TC on a jeep trail in the Inyo mountains in CA. A sharp rock punched a 3 inch gash right through the sidewall with a big pop and hiss, even heard over the noise that our CTD puts out. We were running them @ 28 pounds and the sidewalls were particularly exposed. So, operator error.
The Discos have become the favored tire of rough road, expedition type campers. They are in a class by themselves with now many imitators barking at their success.
When the factory 32.2 inch Goodyear LT275/70R18 OWL A/T 3640 pound rated tires wear out, which by all accounts shouldn’t be long, we’ll install Cooper XLT AT3 LT 285/75R18’s. They’re 34.49 inches in diameter with a 4080 pound load rating effectively dropping our final drive ratio from 4.30 to 4.10 and increasing the sidewall height for lowering the pressure on sand.
Of all the different tires we’ve had on our Dodge Cummins (185K miles worth) hauling our truck camper, the Discos are the best all round tire for what we do, are quiet and deliver very good extended tread life, and good traction on a variety of surfaces.
Part of that is because the design has large lug area and small voids.
jefe2020 Ford F-350 XLT FX4 4WD SRW SB SC 7.3L Godzilla Gas TorqShift 10R140 397 amps dual Alt dual batts Frnt Dana 60; Rr Dana M275 E-locker 4.30's 4580/4320/4066# payload 7243# curb wt. 11,300# GVWR 5-er prepped. 2020 Northstar Laredo SC, 12v compressor fridge, cassette, 320w Solar sub zero insulation.
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