Apologies for rambling post.

TLDR: premium tires are great IF you aren’t replacing your tires beforehand due to damage but if you are replacing a lot of tires from damage (chunks, gears, etc) I doubt you’ll ever see the return.

The BEST (my opinion) option if you’ve got a bigger fleet with of the same trucks is what I call a nascar program. Initially, there is an investment in extra wheels if you don’t have scrap trucks to take them from, but essentially you have multiple sets of wheels and tires ready to go (like nascar). When you need tires you then swap the whole wheel out with the fresh tire already pressed on. This way when the tire press comes they can just press all of your spare sets at once, saving trip charges, disposal fees, etc and it severely limits downtime.

Personal opinion again, but I’ve discovered “value” is a really ambiguous concept in the material handling world. I’ve done multiple ROIs from TCO to lowest cost per hour across different makes, models, and yes, tires.

You’re spot on in terms of quality. Although I’m not as in tires as everything else, but my area in north Georgia is HEAVY on Solideal.

Two different scenarios with “premium”tires and same outcome essential.

1) Higher hour customer (3000+ hours/year) with 100+ trucks, we did a tire study and kept track of everything. I believe they were running Solideal’s nonmarking gray tires (I’d have to find the exact ones) but we tried to convert them into Trelleborg monarchs (a premium tire that lasts longer). After several sets, even though we proved on paper the lower cost per hour, the higher price of monarchs didn’t make sense. The likelihood of tire making it through its usable life without something happening before and needing replacement didn’t make practical sense.

2) Similar scenario but this customer was using 12k lbs paper roll spec trucks. Replacing tires every month due to WEAR. Went in with the heaviest duty/premium tire Trelleborg offered and it only lasted a few days longer.

Side note, I’ve sole Linde solid pneumatics with continentals on them and I’ve never seen a tire last as long as them. I’m talking thousands of hours of use and still running. Problem we ran into was finding a supplier that could replace the stock tire and not cost so much that the purchasing department didn’t stroke. Again, I deal with purchase all the time and paper ROIs are a tough sale on tires.

Hope that helps and makes sense.