Suggest me a good tire for my car

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m out of my depth on car stuff in general, specifically tires. I usually go to the shop and say “give me whatever fits and is on sale”. This time I want to find the best tire.

Make/model: 2008 Honda Odyssey Touring.

Tire size: I’m confused about the best tire size here, it’s a used car and not sure if I have OEM wheels. OEM recommendation is 17 inches. I’ve always bought R17, but yesterday I measured outer tire rim at 18.5". So something seems wrong here and I want to make sure I’m getting this right.

Parameters:

  • Price: Not looking to overspend, but very flexible
  • Safety for conditions is most important.
  • Conditions: 99.9% pavement. 90% dry, 10% wet. Should I choose summer tires outright? We only get about 2 weeks of sub-freezing temps annually, and snow/ice less than 5 days annually (many years there’s none at all).
  • Ride noise and comfort: Willing to splurge on low-noise tires but not sure about options and price.
  • Tread wear: Not sure what I need here. I can afford the cost of swapping every 3 years if need be. But I don’t want to deal with extra rotating, extra shopping, extra flats.
  • Brand: no clue whatsoever, total blissful ignorance.

The tirerack.com site keeps showing me these.

  • Goodyear Assurance ComfortDrive
  • Michelin Crossclimate 2
  • Vredelstein HiTrac All Season

Of those, most expensive is quoted $224/ea, and I’m fine with that.

Any help appreciated. Thanks in advance!

2

The size is written on the sidewall of the tire so you can just look. It typically has three numbers in a format like “235/60R17”.

235/60R17 happens to be the stock size for your vehicle with 17" wheels but to be sure, just look at your current tires.

ETA: 18.5" is not a wheel size that I’m aware of. It should be a round number of inches. I assume the measurement is from the inside diameter but I’ve never measured one. I just look at the tire size.

3

Michelins have given me the best performance. In Florida I used Pilot Sports summers; in Ohio their version of that in all-seasons. Great grip, good wear, and the a-s’s have lower road noise that the summers did.

4

In my opinion, Michelins aren’t worth the Top Dollar. Good tires, but for the money, Kumho’s are just fine. Just avoid any tires made in China. Tirerack is the place to shop, so you’re starting out correctly.

5

If you would like a personal recomendation, I would go with the Michelins. After years of driving my performance car on other tires, I just put a set of all season Michelin Pilot Sports on my car. Mine are speed rated performance tires, because you never know when you might need to go 165 mph. I live where rain is very common, they are the best tires I have ever had on my car.

6

BRIDGESTONE TURANZA EL400-02

These guys are on closeout, and a $70 rebate to boot!

7

My concern is the tire size currently on the vehicle might be wrong. As I said it has R17, but the rim measures about 18.5". I bought the car used without standard run-flat tires and I’m concerned that the previous owner put entirely new wheels on.

8

If my climate is mostly like Florida, but we might get about 10 days total of sub-freezing temps, am I compromising safety or performance by using a summer tire?

9

I lived in NE Florida. While my work schedule typically didn’t have me coming into work in the early morning (note work was right across the street from my place), when it was in the late 30’s & early 40’s they were a bit ungrippy but not excessively so, which merely put them on par with most all-seasons. You almost certainly will be fine unless you have to drive when it is 22 out (recall a deep freeze happened in late December).

10

If it’s a 17" tire and it’s installed on the wheel. it’s a 17" wheel. That’s not in doubt.

11

Agreed. The OP can check the original equipment tire size on the sticker on the door jamb. I’d bet the tires on the van match the original size. People usually swap wheels for better performance or better looks, neither of which is a typical priority for typical minivan buyers. If the current tires don’t match the size on the door jamb, the OP can let us know.

12

I worked in a garage when I got back from the army.

Stay away from off-brands like Yokohama-- they just aren’t great tires-- they peel, and “luxury” brands like Turanza, as someone already said, are generally overpriced-- marginally better at twice the price.

The best tires for the money are actually store brands, like Firestone, or Goodyear. The exception is if you can get the higher brands on sale-- it’s usually because they are overstocked on them, and you can benefit.

Taking advantage of sales where you get four tires at once, at a steep discount, are a good deal-- you get the labor for almost nothing. It’s a loss-leader where they are trying to build a base of repeat customers-- and maybe sell you something else you are due for.

And by the way, if they tell you something is bad, like tie rod ends, or that brakes are due, it’s true. In most places, it’s against the law for them to lie, and at any rate, it’s probably against company policy, and they have meetings where the employees are told this-- not to mention, tires and therefore service checks, aren’t done by the one master mechanic who works each shift-- they are done by the hourly guys who turn tires and do oil changes, and get paid the same no matter what, and get no benefit whatsoever from recommending extra services.

If one tire blows, and you didn’t get the road hazard warranty, getting a used tire to replace it to limp along until you can get four-- if that is going to be in the next six months, works. But seriously, the road hazard warranty is a good idea, especially if you are going someplace like Firestone, because any Firestone in the US will honor it, so if you blow a tire on a road trip, put on the spare, and plug “Firestone” into your GPS.

If you can’t find a deal, and the tire really is old, probably they all are old. But if you can’t afford 4 tires, ask the mechanics to replace the blown tire, and the next worse one, and put the new ones on the front, and the other two on the back, and balance & rotate the two on the back, if they are coming from different sides. Even if you have rear-wheel drive, because you want your steering tires to have the best traction. The exception is if you live up a literal mountain, but discuss that with the store manager.

If you have a luxury or sports car that has a weird size, and only something like Turanza fits, suck it up. If you could afford the car (and the gas it probably takes, you can afford the tire).

13

I’d get 5, and replace one of those mini-spare abominations with the real thing. If you have a flat in the fronts, and it’s front-wheel drive with limited-slip differential, you have to switch a back one to the front, then put the temp. spare on the back, doubling your workload when it might be 3 am and 40 degrees out. You’ll need to buy a wheel of course, and make sure your trunk has space for the full-sized one.

14

Yokohama isn’t an off brand.

Turanza is not a brand either. It’s a model (or a line of models) from Bridgestone.

These aren’t “store brands” as that term is usually used. They are name brands, which are also sold in specialized tire stores.

You put the best tires on the back because it minimizes the risk of oversteer, which for most drivers is much harder to manage and thus more dangerous than understeer.

15

Every time I get a new car, I get a full-sized wheel for it from a junk yard, and then a used tire. It’ll be a tire that was a 40,000 or 50,000 mile tire with 10,000 miles left on it. That’s a lot more than the 50 miles on a donut spare, and you can drive highway speed on it. Keep the donut spare, though, and throw it in the trunk when you go out of town.

16

The spare tire in my car fits in a little well below the hatchback floor. I’m pretty sure that well is sized to fit the compact spare tire and not a full-size one. So if I replaced it with a full-size spare, I’d have to carry the thing in the hatchback, which is pretty inconvenient. And I’ve only very rarely needed a spare tire, so I’m happy to leave the compact spare tire in place.

17

I forgot to answer the actual post - generally summer tires are for high performance in dry weather but my view is that they trade off a lot of cold weather and wet weather performance for essentially no performance gain in day-to-day traffic. Summer tires are somewhere between bad and awful in the rain compared to all season tires. Some summer tires aren’t even supposed to be exposed to sub-freezing conditions, let alone driven in sub-freezing conditions. Summer tires have softer compounds and wear faster, so more tire rotations may be necessary in addition to needing more frequent replacement. Summer tires also often have stiffer sidewalls and lower profiles than would be commonly applied to minivans. I doubt you can get most summer tires in a size that even fits your minivan. If you do get them to fit, they will be less comfortable and possibly at greater risk of pothole damage than regular tires due to the shorter sidewall. Unless you are driving so fast on on-ramps and around traffic circles that the tires are squealing, you are incredibly unlikely to benefit from the added dry grip from summer tires. Get a good set of all season tires.

You can research tires on Tirerack.com. It looks like consumers have rated the Michelin Crossclimate 2 the highest of any tire that fits your Odyssey. I like the Michelins on my car but I don’t have the same model tires or the same type of car. Your usage pattern is pretty close to mine though.

18

Awesome info, thanks for that.

19

I suppose you could just keep it for road trips. I’ve managed to have flat flats that couldn’t be plugged at least three times I can remember when I needed to get someplace and needed to drive on the highway, or was out of town.

Maybe it makes more sense for me, because I live in a city where it’s hard to get through a day without some highway driving, and I have a schedule where you can’t always get a tire replaced before you need to drive on it.

I know how to plug a tire, keep a small compression inflator that plugs into the accessory whatever (used to be the “cigarette lighter”) under the front seat, and I have still gotten caught with tires that needed to be changed.

20

If you do this you need to check the date code on the tire. Such a tire could have been sitting as a spare or in the junkyard for years and years so the tire could be 15 years old and prone to a blowout when you need it. Frankly I also wonder how long those donuts are good for–as people get them new with a new car and almost never replace them.

https://www.tirerack.com/upgrade-garage/how-do-i-determine-the-age-of-my-tires

PS: An advantage of a local dealer over an online dealer like Tirerack is that your install package usually includes free lifetime balancing and rotation–and over the life of a set of tires this really adds up.