Ranking Different Road Surfaces For Tire Tread Wear Rate

[BillyHW]

Hey folks,

I was wondering if some knowledgeable people out there could help me rank different road surfaces from best to worst in terms of how much they contribute to tire tread wear. Here are some in no particular order:

• New Asphalt
• Old Asphalt
• Concrete
• Dirt
• Gravel
• Ice
• Very Cold Ice
• Snow
• Cobblestone

etc...please add any that I may have missed.

(It would be cool if we could even assign some sort of approximate numerical factor to each surface, like if new asphalt = 100% then gravel = XXX% or whatnot. I'm particularly interested in knowing how much worse (or better) gravel may be vs. asphalt.)

Thanks for any insights you might be able to provide.

 

[Rand]

it depends even concrete and asphalt are regionally different..
and of course the type of terrain.. cleveland is very different than pittsburgh. (terrain)
while both cleveland and florida are flat the aggregate is different in florida.

So many factors come into play not just basic road surface type.

 

[fsdork]

Throttle and braking application on the various surfaces will have more impact on tire wear than the surface itself. New asphalt and new concrete have the highest coefficient of friction (µ) (0.65-1.20) of all of those surfaces, so if the tire is slipping on those surfaces, it would presumably experience the most wear. If your throttle and brake application are consistent on all surfaces and reasonably moderate, you could theoretically experience more tire wear on old asphalt, as the tire would be more likely to experience slip on the lower µ surface, if all else is equal.

Sharp gravel is a whole other kettle of fish, as it will rock-drill tires and take chunks out of the tread even if the tire is just rolling.

 

[bullwinkle]

Very cold ice would be lowest, since the pressure of the tire on the surface melts it somewhat (according to Tire Rack's testing), very cold ice would resist the melting action. As mentioned above, there are large differences between asphalt types, depending on what aggregate is contained in the asphalt-it can be smooth, or as some tar & chip jobs around here, borderline gravel. Smooth concrete (rare on a road), grooved to improve winter traction, standard, or bombed-out pothole city (our most common type in the 'Nati!)?

 

[krzyss]

Ice 0%
Gravel 110% or more.

IMHO.

Krzys

 

[Eddie]

I live in Cape Coral and some of the older roads still use coral for the asphalt filler. Tose roads can reduce a tire to the steel belt in 10,000 miles where they normally might get 35,000 + miles.

 

[CapriRacer]

2 stories:

I got a phone call from the vehicle maintenance department of the phone company in southern Florida. They were complaining about the tire wear on their brand new vans that they used to install landlines in new subdivisions (This was quite a while ago!). They said they were only getting 7,500 miles out of their OE tires. I asked them what they expected - and the response was 10,000 miles.

I was flabbergasted at both those figures. A little research revealed that southern Florida uses "New Limestone" in their concrete - and "New Limestone" has sharp edged sea shells when crushed - unlike "Old Limestone" where those shells are crushed to a dust by the enormous pressure and time in the earth before they are quarried.

Those edges were literally slicing off chunks of rubber from the tires.

Needless to say, those vans didn't get a lot of miles, but were driven on the new concrete and lots of turns per mile.

The second part of the story was that I was testing those same tires in a courier fleet on the same vehicle - and some of those vehicles would get over 100,000 miles - and I could tell which of those vehicles were going to get that because those were the ones traveling between cities, rather than traveling within the city - few turns per mile vs a moderate amount of turns per mile.

So there you have it. Same tire, same vehicle, different locales, but the real differences were turns per mile. And the result was HUGE!! differences in wear! That pattern (turns per mile) seemed to have a much bigger effect than road surface.

 

[Lubener]

I think the worse surface is what you see in rural areas where wet tar is applied to ashault and dressed with a layer of gravel.

 

[bonjo]

lubener these are exactly how the malority of our roads are theses days! And after 6 months, the gravels come loose, fly all over the place leaving nice groove & line of the surface.
IMO
the smoother the surface, the less wear.

 

[Jdeere562]

Gravel chews the heck out of tires. Been there, done that.

 

[Andrew1972]

Surface plays a role. However the biggest difference in longevity is amount of turns(especially sharp).