Tire Matching Front to Rear

No matter what type of vehicle you have, having mismatched tires front to back can sometimes cause handling problems. Granted, this really doesn't happen that often, and it is usually no problem to have different tires on a car. However, if the front tires react faster to the road (are higher performance) it will cause the vehicle to "oversteer".

How this works is that if front tires react faster to the road, when the front tires have finished turning, the rear tires still are. With mild oversteer, the vehicle will just feel unstable and the driver will have to make a lot of corrections. This is because when the rear tires catch up to the fronts, it causes the vehicle to be turned more than the driver had originally intended, hence the term "over"steer. On the other hand, if the oversteer is extreme, the driver will make correction after correction and may even crash due to the inability to steer properly. In addition, with any amount of oversteer, if the driver has to slam on the brakes or swerve suddenly, the vehicle is likely to spin out, and obviously, that is very serious.

No matter how severe the oversteer, the normal solution is to simply rotate the tires and leave them there. This will fix the problem. So on most cars, the worst consequence of oversteer caused by mismatched tires is that you won't be able to rotate the tires. However, if you have a car with different tire sizes front to rear, it becomes much more important to have tires that working properly together since you can't rotate them. The obvious solution to this is to make sure to have the same brand and model tires on all four. Sometimes however, this just isn't possible, so an alternate solution would be to make sure that the rear tires are higher performance than the fronts. Then the rear will react faster. So the main point here is to be very careful when buying only two tires on vehicles with different tires front and rear. Obviously, experienced tire professionals can help with this.

As a side note, air pressure can also be a problem, or a solution, when it comes to oversteer. On many European vehicles, and most pickup trucks, the vehicle manufacturer specifies more air pressure in the rear. Most people believe this is just for load bearing capacity. However, car or truck, more air in the rear tires also has the benefit of making the rear of the vehicle more stable. Therefore, putting more air in the rear will often stabilize an otherwise "squirrelly" handling vehicle. Also, we recommend that you never put less air in the rear tires of a pickup. For more on this, see our "Air Pressure" article.

Back To Tires 101