Car tyre on a bike

with longer tyre life comes less grip, and on something that has only got 2 wheels lots of grip is kinda nessesary, so id rather not dump the bike and pay for new tyres slightly more often imo

[mister c]

Mate of mine had car tyres on his GS850 Combo. Leading link front sussies & little tyres, looked quite cool

Originally Posted by arenalife

An insight into how differently we use the roads can be seen in his description of tyre life, he said his last car tyres lasted 70,000 miles!! It's usually about 12 - 15k over here. American car tyres must be hard as nails. No wonder they're mentally unprepared for bike tyre life.

probably made of the world's finest, hardest plastic, hence why they don't have any bends over there...

i'll stick to the normal motorbike tyres thank you very much

[yorkie_chris]

Originally Posted by andreis

I do get his point about manufacturers not willing to make tyres that last on motorbikes, as there isn't a sufficiently large market to account for development costs. So they NEED to last a short amount of time, so that we keep buying more tyres than a car owner to compensate for the lack of large numbers...

I disagree with that.
They have a completely different job. You want to try making a tyre having same coefficient of friction as ours with the size of the contact patch?

Car tyres can be basically made of plastic and work fine.

Originally Posted by yorkie_chris

I disagree with that.
They have a completely different job. You want to try making a tyre having same coefficient of friction as ours with the size of the contact patch?

Car tyres can be basically made of plastic and work fine.

I am in no position to say anything about the technology that goes into designing a good compound/design for bike tyres and it's obvious that they do try on the research of the compound itself (seeing as the friction coeff of bike tyres is generally higher than that of cars).

But about production technology, I'm not so sure, seeing as a brand new bike tyre requires so much weight to balance properly. I'm pretty sure they're skimping on costs somewhere and this was obvious to me when I was in the market for a new back tyre and read about some of the highly acclaimed ones. Every thread on tyre selection was riddled with people having trouble with the inconsistency of them. I seem to recall even Rossi making a comment about the tyres of a major manufacturer regarding inconsistence of quality (although he was praising the advancements made in friction coeff and such). Now, if you've got bad tyres at that level, than what are we to expect?

Okay, it's a given that perhaps when dabbling with the limits of physics you're gonna get some problems, but it does not exempt them from criticism.

Now, luckily, the tyre I have on the back now (Michelin PR 2) has not given me any problems, but it did require a lot of weight to balance and I felt I was a bit lucky that that was all that was required.

I just don't think that me feeling lucky to get a good one is the way to go for a manufacturer to earn trust.. I should be feeling extremely unlucky to get a bad one

Oh, and I don't understand what the size of the contact patch has to do with anything other than wear (of course, size of contact patch related to weight of vehicle gives better or worse wear).. Is there something I'm missing?

[yorkie_chris]

A car tyre has a huge contact patch in comparison to a bike, so for similar grip, the compound can be more hard wearing.

Agreed

[yorkie_chris]

That is most of that guys argument.

Because he has a fat cruiser with no ground clearance or power, he does not need a tyre with 50 degrees of possible lean in it and high friction coefficient at edge. So for his use a car tyre is actually more optimised. He uses same lean as a car has body roll.

Like anything, you make one area better but compromise in another. He has a tyre which won't square off, at the expense of cornering capacity (which he could never use).

Still, fact that he was destroying (literally) touring tyres in 3000 miles suggests he was doing something very wrong to those. Especially to have ALL of them fail so catastrophically. Maybe loading them beyond their rating or similar abuse.

Now someone should put bike tyres on a car .