So, I posted the other day about possibly selling my prius, or my civic, not sure yet which one to sell, but I brought my Prius in for it's annual inspection today & was advised I need new tires and a wheel alignment, so car did not pass inspection. They offered to put on Starfire tires made by Cooper (which I never heard of) for $500 or so. I remember when I bought my last tires, I purchased a specific brand recommended by the Prius group. Any advice of a preferred tire brand that won't break the bank but are reliable? Live in the NYC area so we get winter ice and snow. Thanks.
I have Starfire's on a Corolla right now made by Cooper they've been fairly decent tires I like the way the sidewall looks so does the kids that drive the car. Tire recommendations for me are ones that are round and cause it any ill effects driving the car And for me is inexpensive as possible I buy a lot of Japanese Chinese Asian whatever tires I change them when they start to turn gray about 18 months I am not looking for $100,000 mi tires I've been down that road I can wear them out in 50 The south and hot roads and all that are tough on tires better to just get new shoes when the other one start looking little ugly
Thanks for this. I think I will go with them as we will be getting a new Toyota this month and won't be putting many miles on the older car we decide to keep, just using it to run errands.
I run Bridgestone Ecopias 422 plus... they were great in snow in Colorado and the little snow here now in Kansas.
Oh heck sitting the tires will outlast the car The Starfire should be 46 to $53 a pop or something like that in the 65 15s that we run. That's Amazon prices right where I get them from them looking in my history and then the Westlake touring radials are pretty good too we've run a bunch of those on our sienna van and Corollas like 10 years worth no problems but if the Prius is going to sit well I wouldn't worry about shoeing her up too good.
This is a "too early to be of much use" report. We just put General Altimax RT45 on ours, replacing a badly worn set of Bridgestone Ecopia EP422. Not enough miles yet to say much, other than there was not a massive change in the mpg. It has gone a couple of hundred miles, half on the highway and half around town, and the fuel economy change, if any, is minor. Supposedly the RT45 have much better traction than the EP422 in wet and in snow (see Tirerack comparison). The latter doesn't matter to me (SoCal in the valleys, never snows) but the EP422s were not great on wet pavement. Have not yet had a chance to drive the new ones in the wet. Cost around $1k for tires, TPMS units, full alignment, and labor. Around half of that was labor. The alignment was indeed slightly off, so good thing it was done. For the highway test I drove straight out the San Gabriel valley towards San Bernardino on the 210 until just past the 15 (North Fontana) and then back. ("The Californians" on SNL nailed how we talk about freeways.) That was the only section nearby where I was sure the speed would stay above 65 mph the whole way. Going out it was using cruise control and the mpg was worse than coming back without it. That's mostly because there was a net 800 ft. elevation gain going out, but also because the road goes gently up and down the whole way, and cruise control does not let the speed bleed off going uphill or let it build up going down. Be nice if cruise controls had a "maximize MPG subject to min speed 60 max speed 75". It wouldn't be too hard to write code to do something like that, but retrofitting that sort of control to this old car would be a lot of work.
