I did not rotate my tires for about 20,000 miles. It looks like the front tires actually wear slower than the rear? Can this be true? anyone else notice this?
This wear pattern is very unusual for a FWD vehicle. Perhaps the rear is out of alignment. Rear beam axles have been known to bend. Do a search on rear axle shims here.
The front tires wear out faster than the rear since its a front wheel drive vehicle, and your front tires move left and right more than the rears. So this is unusual, unless someone rotated your tires without telling you lol...
I find it very wierd too. I have 40,000 miles on them and have about 5/32 left in the rears and 4/32 in the front. They were the goodyear assurance fuel max. The tread wear is perfect.....I rotated them at 10 and again at 20. Then I skipped the 30 and did it at 40. That is when I noticed the back was a bit better than the front. I do not see the wisdom in changing them every 5,000 miles..if they are going to last 60,000 miles, you should have them on the front for half the distance and the rear for half the distance. That way front to back wear will even out and you will need to replace both of them at the same time. I have never seen a front wheel car though not wear out the front tires substantially faster than the rears.
Thought about this some more.... The only logical answer for this is the battery in the back weighs the car down causing increase wear on the back tires. This is enough to make the tire wear roughly equal in the front and the back. I can not find the specification for the weight distribution for this car between the front and back. So my questions: 1. Does anyone know what the front to back distribution is? 2. Has anyone gone a long time without rotating and noticed the fronts wearing that much faster? You guys might think I am crazy, but the art of engineering is about trading off one issue for another. It appears that from my limited experience the need for rotating the tires is not as great as it is for other classical front end cars, hence, you can back off the rotation frequency and get the same performance from your tires. Thanks ahead of time.
If you visit most modern truck stops, you'll find a scale with multiple axle pads. Might cost you $5 or so to weigh it. Accuracy is another question in such a "small" vehicle, but distribution between axles should be pretty accurate. More likely that you already had wear on the fronts that you didn't notice, and it became more apparent 20K miles later after they were on the back.
Puzzling deal. My 10 Prius has the same tires, the Goodyear Assurance fuel max, they have been on the car without a rotation for 20,000 miles. Today I checked tread wear and find exactly the same situation. The front tires have 1/32 wear and the rears have 2/32 wear ??. Tread wear across the tread is very even, so I doubt there are alighnment or pressure issues (44PSI cold front and rear), yet the end that only holds up the rear of the unladen car(no cargo or rear seat passengers), has twice the wear of the heavy end that drives, steers, regen brakes the car ???? I like the Goodyear Fuel max tires. Much less road noise and much softer ride than the Yokohama Avid S33 original tires, and seem to be wearing only 1/2 as fast as the Yoko's. Did take a slight mpg hit though, but the rest makes up for that .
I'm not sure what is causing rears to wear more quickly in the above cases, I recently rotated my rears with 2 mm of tread to the front because the fronts have only got 1mm of tread left. I'm running Michies.
