Originally Posted by CapriRacer
Originally Posted by grampi
I see different, never before seen by me brands every time I go online to look for new tires. There couldn't possibly be this many different tire companies, my guess is the same companies just keep changing the names on their tires. What this is supposed to accomplish, I have no idea...
Perhaps it is time for me to talk about the many ways different brands exist.
As Grampi says, there are some brands that are different tire companies - BUT - he implies that there exists some internal brands (true!) and that there aren't any external brands (false!)
Some brands are owned by retailers or wholesalers and one can't tell who is manufacturing the tires. An example is Futura, which is a brand owned by Pep Boys. While these have been manufactured by Cooper, there is no guarantee that this will be so in the future. Typically the warrantee is handled by whoever owns the brand name - with perhaps feedback to the tire manufacturer. Please note that in these cases, even though the tire may have been manufactured by brand named manufacturer, the warrantee can only be handled through the outlet. Walmart's Douglas brand is another example.
Some brands are indeed owned by the tire manufacturers - Goodrich, Kelly, Firestone, come to mind - and they run the gamut from tightly held, with good advertising support and good warrantees (such as the 3 mentioned) to some which are on the other end - basically no advertising or warrantee support.
And then there is the issue of the quality of the tires. Some are direct clones of brand name tire lines - with either just a name change, but otherwise identical - to same tire but in a different mold, so it looks completely different - to some which are completely unique (they are completely different than any other tire manufactured).
- AND -
I want to point out that even when private brand tires are identical in appearance to a brand named tire, there could be differences in the way the tires are processed - what I think of as *Quality* - that is consistency from individual tire to individual tire. There are machines that will measure and sort tires according to things like balance or uniformity level - not to mention inspection level - visual appearance imperfections. This is even true within a tire line - such as the difference between what gets sent to a vehicle manufacturer and what gets sent to a tire retailer.
So a private brand could be as high a quality as a brand name tire - or it could be on the other end of the spectrum - and the average joe can't tell the difference.
The only thing I was really implying was what I said; I see different brand name tires every time I'm in the market to buy tires, and that there couldn't possibly be that many different companies that make tires. I don't really care about the warranty from the tire company as I always get my tires at Discount Tires, and they back all of their tires in the same way. If a tire goes bad, or needs to be replaced for any reason, they replace it prorated based on it's initial selling price minus the mileage deduction. Over the course of aprox. 500K miles, I've had one blowout, and I've had two tires replaced due to slipped belts. Other than that, the cheap tires I buy have held up to their mileage rating or better. I'd say that's acceptable...I just wonder what new brand I'll see the next time I need new tires...