Another Michelin Price Increase

I heard because of raw material shortages that Michelin is focusing on 22.5 tires and hasn’t really been producing 24.5’s for a while now.

 

I haven't been able to get the Michelin 24.5 for a while, so I put on some Firestones and can't complain for now.

 

Never had any luck with michelins

 

"And the band played on",,,

 

I was in the same position back in December. I was trying to buy a set of Michelin steer tires for my new-to-me truck and the price point between the Michelin's and the Firestones was enough for me to run the Firestone FD591's again. I have a pair on my older truck and I have just over 122,000 miles on them and they are still doing just fine.

 

I got a Toyo steer about a month ago when I had truck aligned. $350 is what paid.
Doing good so far. M177 295/75R22.5

 

Dang
I’m actually on the schedule to get all new X Line Grip drives put on this morning
Good thing I’m ahead of the increase

There’s a new young trainee girl at the desk, I get a national discount but wanted to know the retail price the older gal gives me the retail price of like $1100? Per tire. Singles. The younger girl about died. She goes that much for just 4 tires?
We both look at her and at the same time say no. That’s for 1
She really about lost it then

I have 370,500 on the ones now and could probably run until fall but I figured 370k is long enough

 

Some of it is green new deal. They are having to change to much more expensive chemical compounding because of new secret epa and carb requirements. They claim As rubber wears down the dust causes cancer in california and ice depletion somewhere really frozen and cold.

 

We used to have a national account with Michelin, only used virgin Michelins for years on all our trucks except our trailers which we just used whatever the cheapest china bombs were.

About 2 years ago we started having problems with Michelin tires, was getting bad vibrations on the front end of our box trucks, sometimes so bad it would be tough to hold a line in a curve on rough 2 lanes.

We complained to our tire rep and he assured us it was problems with our trucks as Michelin was the best in the industry. We had our trucks with problems looked over several times and couldn’t find anything wrong with them mechanically.

The only thing we could figure was belts were breaking inside the tires causing the horrible vibration, even though we have new steer tires spun balanced when installed on the truck. We would just take the tires off and save them for trailer tires.

Finally our tire rep said he was getting more complaints from other customers about the Michelin tires. We decided to switch to Yokohama tires as we got a bran new truck with them factory installed and they did much better than the Michelins. But with the shortages the last year we have been just buying whatever we could find.

Just for background info we are a small fleet running mostly 26k and 33k gvw box trucks and 3 single screw tractors. We run about a 50/50 mix of interstate and back roads, with a little off road at our customers and job sites.

 

The bad thing about Michelins are they ozone crack. It all started in 2011 with the compounding change due to the climate mandates then. The “Green X” compounds as they call it will dry rot in sunlight within a year. This weakens the sidewall if the cracks become to large. The rubber also loses its flexibility and it chunks and tears easier. Bead tearing during mount/dismount is more common now also. A low mileage fleet will see this problem. Leave a truck sitting for a few weeks in the direct sunlight and the cracks will appear.
We are prepared to see worse in the new lines to come.
Yokohama uses “orange oil” to combat the ozone issues. With better luck then BIb’s “green X”.

 

I run yoko, no complaints so far!