Tire recommendation for a Toyota Prius - Ask Rob About Cars

March 24, 2014

What is the best tire for 2009 Toyota Prius? I live in Massachusetts and I've gone thru 2 sets of Integrity tires since 2010. Gas mileage is important to me but I’m only getting a year out of them and I average 15,000 miles per year. An economy car tire should last at least 40,000 miles or far longer with no compromise in performance or safety.
- Diane in Massachusetts

Hello Diane,

The bad news is the Integrity has a tread wear warranty of 6 years or 50,000 miles. If both of your 15,000 mile sets were replaced by the same shop and they, or Goodyear, didn't give you a warranty credit, I would ask them to provide you a new set of tires. If you have the documentation, Goodyear may provide assistance. It might be a long shot with the first set, but worth a try. This may obligate you to another set of Goodyears though. For future reference, 15,000 with even tread wear is absolutely inexcusable for anything but a high performance car tire or something else extreme such as track use or very poor roads.

The good news is there are better tires that cost less with superior performance and warranties. If you go on the long-established and popular website www.tirerack.com and search by your tire size of 185/65/15 you'll find a large selection of good tires. One of the top rated choices, for only $57 per tire and a tread wear warranty of 5 years or 70,000 miles with free replacement in the first three years if
the tread is worn down to 2/32", is the Firestone Precision Touring tire. It is an all-season tire which you need in your region. Fuel mileage differences between similar tires will be very small, and I don't recommend shopping on that criteria alone.

Since shipping may not be convenient for you, Tire Rack has recommended installers and tire shops usually will match the price to within $10 per tire or so to cover shipping.

Good luck on your next set, keep me posted!

Robert Eckaus
San Jose Cars Examiner

High Mileage Tires - Test Results on the Toyota Prius

The Tire Rack recently tested six environmentally friendly tires designed for low rolling resistance for higher miles per gallon vs. the original tire equipped on the Toyota Prius. The results were surprising and quite promising. See the report here, "When Round and Black Becomes Lean and Green"

It was always an interesting dilemma regarding tires and how they perform. Get more tread life from your tires and sacrifice performance or emergency maneuver capability (braking distance) due to hard compounds. Achieve better performance and suffer from faster tire wear and higher cost of ownership.

I never understood why low rolling resistance tires would wear out quickly. The assumption was always a hard tire would have less rolling resistance and therefore would last longer. Instead, as explained by Matt Edmonds, Vice President of Marketing at The Tire Rack, the low rolling resistance tires in the past would "give themselves up" to the road, hence wearing faster. But due to advances in tire compound technology and tread design, this is no longer the case. These modern tires now show advantages over the same model that comes on the car, in this case a Toyota Prius, from the factory. Check out the Test Result Charts here.

An interesting observation is that the original Goodyear Integrity tires perform the best in the dry, but not by a large margin. However, they were rather poor in the wet. Especially in wet braking distance, inexcusably worse than the rest. Of course, when the tire was first introduced, it may have been the ideal choice for cost and performance.

Tread wear would be the final aspect that a 550 mile test loop cannot show. However, looking in the "warranty" link for each tire, most have very good tread life warranties. Contrast that with more expensive (albeit larger/wider) high performance tires that last 20,000 miles if you're lucky. and the appeal of lower operating costs and less waste looks very attractive. One thing about all-season tires, they don't react negatively to cold temperatures like high performance tires. Here is my idea for a tread temperature measurement feature.

Take a look at the test results and you'll see not all tires are created equal. The variance is not just the tread pattern. The Tire Rack is an excellent resource for information including tires and equipment. Even if you don't buy from them, when shopping for new tires many retail outlets will have a price matching policy to within a certain amount so you always know you're getting a good deal.

Now when shopping for tires for your daily-driver, a low rolling resistant tire is no longer a compromise in safety or tread life. As technology advances with a continued emphasis on safety and miles per gallon, tires continue to be another avenue of improvement as well.

Got a question about cars you would like answered? Performance, racing, modifying, shopping, makes, models, events, etc? Ask me here: AskRobAboutCars@gmail.com and I'll do my best to answer your question and publish it here on Examiner.com!