• Welcome Guest! If you are already a member of the BMW MOA, please log in to the forum in the upper right hand corner of this page. Check "Remember Me?" if you wish to stay logged in.

    We hope you enjoy the excellent technical knowledge, event information and discussions that the BMWMOA forum provides. Why not take the time to join the club, so you can enjoy posting on the forum, the club magazine, and all of the discounts and benefits the BMWMOA offers?

    Want to read the MOA monthly magazine for free? Take a 3-month test ride of the magazine; check here for details.

  • NOTE. Some content will be hidden from you. If you want to view all content, you must register for the forum if you are not a member, or if a member, you must be logged in.

Car Tire as Rear Bike Tire - WHATDOYOUTHINK?

Status
Not open for further replies.

Michael B

New member
Even with my new 2011 1200 RT, I still ride with my old Gold Wing buddies. The number of guy putting car tires on the rear of their Wings is increasing quite a bit, actually a lot. The main reason is the lure of getting 30,000+ miles on a tire that costs around $100 with virtually no loss of handling ability or any safety issues. And we ride a LOT of twisties together.

No value judgement here...Just putting out the idea for general discussion. I can certainly understand the economic incentives of both the riders wanting double the miles at nearly half the price, and tire manufacturers wanting to maintain current price points.

If this phenomenon gains a lot of traction, maybe a motorcycle tire manufacturer might consider designing a high-milage hybrid car/cycle tire to capture a market trend.

Personally, I'm sticking with traditional rear cycle tires for now, but it is an interesting thought. What do you guys think?
 
I think it is the stupidest thing I've heard of in a long time.

Don't you think that if it worked as well as people claim, the manufacturers would be all over it?

Oh, maybe these are the Darwin brand of tires....
 
I think it's scary--but I know an Ironbutter who did that very thing to his Gold Wing...so who am I to judge...
 
...virtually no loss of handling ability or any safety issues....

Nonsense. Car tires have flexy sidewalls, bike tires have much more rigid ones. Car tires have flat contact surfaces, bike tires have rounded contact surfaces because bikes, you know, lean. If it were a good idea, there'd be more Iron Butters doing it than just Mac's friend.

Given the different work they do, it stretches credulity that one could substitute a car tire for a bike tire without encountering handling or safety issues, particularly in bad conditions or with marginal traction.

Feel free to go right ahead. I'll pass.
 
Maybe they know something we don't. Nobody's doing it on the front tire, just the back. Might work well on a wing with training wheels:scratch
 

Attachments

  • thumbnail.aspx.jpeg
    thumbnail.aspx.jpeg
    11.3 KB · Views: 575
What I know

My acquaintance did it with his Suzuki Burgman and was pleased with the change. I always considered tires the biggest ripoff in the biking world and how the crotch rocket guys can stomach shelling out all that money every few thousand miles is beyond me.

There was a big article about this in one of the cycling magazines recently, but I don't recall which one.
 
You won't find a suitable sized car tire to fit your RT rim. Sidecar guys do it all the time but usually use an adapter to mount a 15x4 atuo rim to the bike, then use a VW size tire that is not so far off profile wise as some here are claiming. Quite a few folks are using this setup on solo bikes as well. YMMV.
Look on ADVRider for more info and search for Darksiders on Google.
 
Let me get this straight...You spent $20k+ on an RT, and now you're going to skimp on tires?

Car tires are meant to corner flat and support a lot of weight. That's why they have squared-off edges and vertical sidewalls. Guys who put car tires on two-wheel bikes (hacks are a different issue, given a particular setup) are idiots who don't understand motorcycle dynamics. The RT is a great handling bike for its size and weight. Why handicap the bike (not to mention the potential danger) for the sake of a few bucks?

On the other hand, you're certainly free to follow the lemmings off the cliff...
 
I for one would like to see some real data on this topic. The comparo article in a major publication a few months back had none; it was just a summary of suppositions and legalese that filled a couple of pages.

It doesn't seem like it would make sense to darkside on a bike, yet there's an accumulating base of anecdotal evidence to the contrary...and I've been behind a couple of wings running darksiders who handled twisty roads pretty well.

With my style of two wheeled riding it's not something I'd try, but I'd like to see some hard data on why they work, and under which conditions they fail.

Pete
 
............. with virtually no loss of handling ability or any safety issues. ..................


That statement is very wrong, You and your buddies may ride the twisty's at parade speeds, and see no difference, but throw in an unexpected reducing radius where you NEED that additional 15% lean angle to make the corner and then let me know the difference, if you are still here to relate the outcome.

I look at tires as insurance, give me the best ones that will be there with the best traction when I need them. Cheap and car tires are like trying to shield yourself with an umbrella in a lightning storm, you will probably not get struck for years, and swear it works, but one day................................
 
not_this_crap_again.jpg
 
The dynamics at work for car tires is so disparate from (2 wheeled) motorcycle tires that it seems like a terrible idea from my layman's position. Of course, I've seen it over and over again on all sorts of bikes. I wouldn't do it purely from an overly conservative safety/engineering concern, but I'm sure there are hundreds of thousands of miles logged each year by motorcycles wearing car rubber. If I were considering it, I would probably seek out better technical advice than a bunch of guys on the internet - maybe an engineer working for a tire manufacturer. If you could find one of those guys who tells you its a good idea, then giddy-up. I'm betting that's not how the conversation will go though.
 
Why would a tire company make a motorcycle tire last 20,000 or 30,000 miles when the average joe will never see that many miles on their bikes?They have us all buying tires way to soon! wow a tire conspiracy! Have we uncovered something here?
 
just to add information for the darksiders.. ( I live in the light totally)

At a recent bike school at a track, you could use their bikes or your own. A valkyrie showed up with a car tire. He had called ahead and asked and they said it was ok. He had recently bought that bike and it came that way. After discussions about it over the two days, he wasn't totally committed to keeping it that way but wasn't totally negative about it either.

One of those days was mostly in the rain. He ran pretty well, didn't feel unsure of it. He did say he could tell in the turn in that it was a little more effort but once on a line it seemed to hold it well.

Surprises thus for me was

One the school allowed
Two it did as well as it did
Three, it did it in the rain too.

Go figure.
NCS
 
Why would a tire company make a motorcycle tire last 20,000 or 30,000 miles when the average joe will never see that many miles on their bikes?They have us all buying tires way to soon! wow a tire conspiracy! Have we uncovered something here?

I don't know that the tire companies don't want to supply a tire with longer life. I think it has more to do with traction, and I would think that traction is more important to us riders than it is to cagers. The softer the rubber the tire is made of the better the traction. But then the softer the rubber, the shorter the tire life. Would we be happier with a longer lasting tire that had a better chance of sliding out from under us on a tight curve?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top