Have any of you been able to find the Energy Saver tires at Costco recently? I've been having a hard time searching for the Energy Saver tires at Costco or Sam's Club and it would be great to get advantage of the $70 rebate and low installation cost. The only place they are in stock is in Tire Rack, but they don't include installation and is a little more expensive in the long run.
Call Americas Tire Company. They match prices and can order the Energy Saver A/S. You just missed their Michelin rebate offer but it's worth trying. They match my Costco prices all the time.
Costco Warrenton, Oregon. I believe the Michelin Energy Saver tires were ordered out of Arizona. They arrived about 4 days later and were installed, I believe on Sept. 13. The tires were manufactured in the 27 and 28 th week of 2012, as stamped on the sidewall of the tires.
I love America's Tire Company! When I was out visiting my friends out in Palm Desert I blew a tire on a fairly large pot hole. America's Tires was not sure if they could get my tire there in time and let me use a used tire so I could drive back home and not on the spare tire. I have never seen this at any other tire place and because of that and the fact that they price match will keep me going to them for as long as I drive cars.
I just called Michelin HQ and the customer service representative mentioned that they are not in production right now and they don't know when production will start again (obviously they know, but they won't tell me), so basically the ones available in stores are the remaining ones. She also mentioned they are not discontinued, but now I am wondering if they are doing that because they will release a new Energy Saver model soon.
I doubt it. They have stopped production a few times now. My guess is they are using the drums and molds used to create the Energy Saver A/S for a different tire like the Defender. It is not cost effective to change the molds back and forth too often so they will make a run of tires then change the molds to make a run of different tires. The Energy Saver A/S is probably not in as high of demand so they only make small runs. The molds are extremely expensive so they generally don't have one for every tire and size available for use at one time.
My local Costco will order them for me and apply the $70 rebate. They had plenty of Defenders but I'm more interested in mpg's than mileage warranty; Enery Savers A/S = 65,000 and Defender = 90,000 miles. Assuming I keep the Energy Savers the full 65,000 miles, I would save almost $1,000 in gas cost alone versus the Defender over the same 65,000 miles. Assumptions are +2 mpg for Energy Saver and -5 mpg for Defenders.
I don't think the Defenders are that bad. I don't think they are more than 2mpg or so worse than OE. I could be wrong though.
I don't have enough data for the Defender but I would say 4mpg is probably close. Depends on how much hypermiling one does.
Just to update the thread, I finally got the Energy Saver's last month from Tire Rack when they had the $70 Michelin rebate. To be honest, I have not noticed an MPG difference yet, but I read in this forum it usually takes a couple of weeks until you see an increase in the MPG (the tires got installed last weekend on October 27th). Before the Energy Saver's, I had the OE Yoko Avid and I can really feel the difference in terms of traction and road noise.
That is a good thing. Usually you will observe a mpg loss when you get new tires. Even if you had installed a new set of AVIDs you would have observed a loss. That means the new tires are already more efficient.
