Flat tires happen more frequently to rear tires, not front tires.
It is just the opposite, a rear tire flat will cause a loss of control faster than a front tire flat. We can steer the front but not the back.
You’ll be steering with one good tire and a flat, too. I’d rather steer with two good tires and know this from experience.
Have you ever had a flat at speed on a front tire? It pulls really hard towards the side with the flat. A rear flat doesn’t cause nearly as much of a steering disturbance.
Discount Tire will NOT install a new pair of tires on the front, they must go on the back. The only exception is if you have a car with staggered tire sizes. My Porsche has very different tire sizes front to rear, making rotation impossible. Even then, they strongly advise against it.
I try to replace all four at the same time, but there was one time when I replaced the fronts only, due an alignment issue in my front suspension that caused my fronts to wear badly. I hated to scrap the rears because they still had 75% tread left, so I replaced just the fronts, against the advice of most tire people. I also addressed the suspension issue (worn bushing) and got a quality alignment done. Within a few weeks I was back to get new rear tires. The car was suddenly squirrelly, and not just a little bit. A matched set of 4 new tires, and all was good with the world.
My other car, an AWD Subaru, will always get tires in sets of 4, dues to the characteristics of the AWD system needing 4 tires of almost exactly the same diameter.
At one tire or service place or another, I heard that there was a horrific accident when someone fishtailed and was disabled but didn’t die, and that’s why they will only put the new pair on the rear wheels. Anyone else heard this tidbit?
That tale probably goes back to the Ford Explorer v. Firestone tires thing.
If the car is front-wheel drive, I heartily agree with this. If the car is rear-wheel drive, especially rear-engined and rear wheel drive (hello Porsche), you are just going to have a challenge. People’s car handling skills should be tested before being allowed to drive a 911. Fun car though!
And, she got a flat in one of the new tires. It’s toast. So we need to get a new one after only two days of driving on it.
Oy.
Put them on the drive wheels.
I had a similar thing happen in an 89 F350 2wd, I needed new tires on the rear to navigate around muddy wellsites, got two new tires put on the rear and the truck was squirelly as hell at 50MPH on the highway. Ended up putting the same tires on the front and solved that problem.
IMHO, you put new tires on the rear of a rear wheel drive vehicle because a newer tire is less likely to have a catastrophic blowout. A catastrophic blowout on a rear tire of a RWD vehicle means that only one of the rear tires has traction, at highway speeds before you realize what happened, you will be spiralling out of control… you don’t want that.
I never knew you were supposed to replace four at once. Heck, I was under the impression that rotating was the process of taking the best 2 old tires and putting them on the wheels that don’t have the new tires. I always thought it sucked you had to buy two tires at a time. Tires are expensive…
In order to maintain your best possible traction and provide the highest level of safety, it’s recommended that you change all 4 tires at the same time. In the real world, most people do not drive at maximum vehicle speeds or at, or above, maximum load ratings. Changing 2 tires is better than changing 1 tire but not as good as changing all 4. However, if I have relatively new, or low mileage tires that are not too old, I’ll only change the one damaged tire.
If you rotate your tires frequently and properly, the idea is that you never have 2 best old tires - they all wear out the same.
At Costco they told me the same thing, linking it to the Firestone incident. They said by company policy they are prohibited from installing two new tires in the front - they must go in the rear.
Sounds like they only get partial training. Go ahead and let them put 'em on the front. Then stop in the parking lot and pull out your gear and switch the wheels while they watch.
Sounds more like a legal concern if they’re saying it’s “company policy”.
It seems everyone else missed (or are ignoring) that OP is talking about 2 new snow tires and two old snow tires.
Assuming it’s a relatively new car with front wheel drive and anti-lock brakes (ABS), put the new ones on the front.
Snow tires that are taken off during the rest of the year can get pretty old. Tires get harder as they old. Hard tires, even snow tires, are substantially slicker on ice and/or hard-packed snow, which is what most winter driving is on.
FYI; there’s a code on the side of tires that indicates when the tires were made.
I always buy tires two at a time. They’ve gotten pretty expensive over the years and I don’t care to deal with the expense of all four at once.
True that. I’m afraid I just get a bit cheesed off when I get told such things - like the racing gloves I had that had a statement printed on them saying they should only be installed by a certified engineer.