Originally Posted By: CapriRacer
And lastly: One of the biggest issue in trying to do tire production schedules is estimating the demand. The company I worked for struggled mightily with the issue. They were at one time experiencing a 30% fill rate (the percent of what they could ship compared with the orders they got.) They made major improvements, but the algorithms used to make predictions just aren't very good.
Is there a reason why car companies, and, thus tire companies need so many different size tires...? For example, a Bridgestone Blizzak WS-80 comes in about 45 sizes... the DM-V1 in over 60 different sizes... !
On my Honda van, for example, a 235/65/16 is the spec size. When i bought the van, only one company made a winter tire in that size... and it was sold out... so I started comparing alternate sizes...
235/65/16 is 28 inches tall , 235 mm wide
225/65/16 is 27.5 tall, 225 wide
215/70/16 is 27.9 tall, 215 wide
225/70/16 is 28.4 tall, 225 wide...
All of these tires are within fractions of inches of each other... do we really need such small differences between tire sizes...?
Maybe if automakers could agree on using some existing size, from a pre-determined range of sizes, tire makers wouldn't have to try and guess what demand for 1 particular size might be...
And if a tire maker could produce, say 1/3 the sizes, or even 1/2, maybe prices would come way down too...!