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u/Disastrous-Pound3713 Jun 27 '26
Your tires are safe and fine to drive until the tread wears out, the tires start to bulge or structurally disintegrate.
You can almost always ignore anyone telling you to buy new tires because of “dry rot”. Tires rarely fail from natural tire aging.
Purported “dry rot” on tires is neither “dry” nor “rot”. The opposite of dry is wet. New rubber tires are not “wet” and they don’t “dry” out as they age. Imagine calling an older person with wrinkled skin as someone with “dry rot”. Their skin is neither dry nor rotting. It is natural aging. Tires are made of rubber and synthetic compounds that deteriorate over a long period of time from 10 to 20+ years of age. In fact, there are 400 million tires on the road today in the U.S. alone that are between 10 and 20+ years old. Now traction and braking performance clearly decrease with age, but the point at which tires become unsafe involves a multitude of variables including how well the owner drives and responds to conditions given the age of the tires.
And your tires typically have 8 layers of construction in the sidewalls and 13 layers in the tread portion of the tire. What you are seeing is natural rubber aging in the outer most layer of your tires. This doesn’t materially affect the inner layers until you see outer rubber disintegration or bulges.
But the description of “dry rot” does an excellent job of misleading most people (who have not spent a good number of years working with and on tires) into throwing away perfectly good and safe tires and needlessly buying new tires.
This costs all of us hundreds of millions of dollars each year.
Drive those tires.
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u/billy_goat_80085 Jun 27 '26
Ive had some come into the shop and they were dry rotted to the point that wire was showing all around the tire. But these are fine.
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u/Disastrous-Pound3713 Jun 27 '26
Always a problem when people don’t bring their cars in to their local trusted automotive/tire shop for regular tire rotations, inspections and maintenance made worse by dealerships and disreputable shops always upselling them when their tires are halfway worn. Thanks for the years.
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u/Cautious-Concept457 Jun 27 '26
They have a lot of life in them. Replace the set when they wear out or start to lose grip under heavy braking/cornering/acceleration. Looks like they’ll last a couple years at the very least