are they worth the cost in fuel savings?

can someone who has actually used them explain to me how they give less traction than conventional duallies?

i understand the rim itself is made of aluminum which is lighter, and i have heard rumors that you can get an extra .5 mpg just from slapping them on.

is it worth investing $$$ into?

 

You aren't going to see .5 mpg improvement unless you put them on both tractor and trailer, and even then it depends on what tires/wheels you're changing from. The improvement over the most efficient dual setup probably won't be that great. They have a slightly smaller footprint (amount of rubber contacting the road) than duals.

Is it worth changing over? Depends on your operation and how much the switch will cost you. In the long term you will probably come out ahead...if you can stay away from road service calls and early replacements.

 

While it is true that wide base tires are more fuel efficient, there are many regular tires now that offer virtually similar rolling resistance and the gap has closed up. Considering that there are some darn efficient low pro standard tires available, it would take a substantially long time to recover the cost of switching to wide based tires. While a person may see up to .5 mpg better, that would only be if one is comparing good wide based tires to really lousy regular tires. When you try and compare wide based tires to something like Michelin's XDA Energy drive tire, any savings by going the wide based route would be very small.

Nothing against wide based, but a person can realize almost the same savings just by doing a little research and getting good low rolling resistance regular tires. That is my preferred way to do it. I buy very low rolling resistance standard sized tires. All of the regular tires I now get come within single digits difference in rolling resistance compared to a similar wide based tire. And I just changed my drive tires and they had roughly 420,000 miles on them and were still legal. I had decided to change them because they were becoming susceptible to hydroplaning after the tread depth got down below 5/32. Did that slip slide game a little in the last two rainstorms I was in, so decided it was time for new ones.

 

Uh, no. Since you brought up Michelin, lets go to their site and see the figures they use for their own tires (including the XDA you mention): Michelin Americas Truck Tires X One® Fuel Savings Page

A casual perusal will show that the XDA Energy Drive tire you swear by is listed as under 100 rolling resistance, on the scale provided, while the wide base XDA-HT is over 140 on the same scale. There is no single-width tire you can purchase that even comes close to wide base in this regard.

As far as the original question in the thread, yes they can be a good investment. Since changing the rims is not inexpensive, you will want to be in a situation where you can use them for a long time to recoup that investment. I'm just past the third complete year in my lease with super singles and I estimate that by the end of this year I will have saved approximately $11,000 over the cost of leaving the factory duals on my tractor.

Good luck,

Jim

 

Lower numbers are better there chief.

 

A "casual perusal" would be more effective if you know what you're looking at. Just how do you arrive at your $11,000 figure?

 

with duals if you get a flat you can keep going and especialy with your trailer duals dont allow it to slide so much ,plus lot cheaper here anyway

 

While numbers seem impressive, they need to be taken in context. First there is the cost of converting to wide based. I present can get low rolling resistance low pro 22.5 Michelin recaps at $170 a tire. I got 420,000 out of the ones I just took off. These tires are within 10 points rolling resistance of a wide based. Now factor the cost of converting to wide based along with rims, average longevity of the wide based tire and the replacement costs. True, you might possibly pull off a tenth mpg better than me, but that is only about $1000 a year if everything else is perfect. To get to that $11,000 savings in 3 years you quote, you would have to prove that your wide based tires are getting almost .4 mpg better than my low rolling resistance 22.5 Michelin. Not going to happen. And from what I have seen of wide based longevity, most will never realize an over 400,000 mile tire life like I have gotten over the last 3 sets of drives.

While wide based have their place, and if they are part of the original equipment build, they should offer some savings. But as a retrofit compared to low rolling resistance low pro standard tires, the ROI is a lot longer and it may be a wash. If someone wants to run them, I'll never look down at them. But to make grandeos claims of saving $11,000 in 3 years better be backed up by some real hard numbers. To make that claim, you would have had to run the same exact truck for 3 years with standard tires, then run it for 3 years with wide based to make a real solid comparison. Now if one was running something like Bridgestone 726's with a high rolling resistance and went to a wide based with a low rolling resistance, it might be conceivable that if you did everything right you might get that .4 mpg better. But no way you are going to get .4 better than, say that Michelin XDA Energy I mentioned before. At the very best, you might tweak out a tenth better if you are lucky.

 

On the chart provided the higher numbers are better... note in the description: "For reasons of simplicity and consistency we have opted to reflect rolling resistance by a relative index."

 

To make the comparisons even fairer, we would have to prove that you ran 420k miles on 8 retreaded duals for three sets in a row, something I'm sure you can back up with real hard numbers. Now, I'm not calling BS, mind you, but perhaps some other drivers with similarly durable recaps could show up and back up that data point.

Also, I claimed the $11,000 estimated savings over four years ("I'm just past the third complete year in my lease with super singles and I estimate that by the end of this year").

The numbers I used to come up with my estimate were a 5% fuel savings on fuel (works out to .3 MPG assuming base is 6.0 MPG), a $1,500 cost of changing from factory tread and rims to wide base (my actual cost in 2008), and 300,000 mile intervals on the tires themselves. I used my actual fuel expense for my first three years of operation as the baseline for fuel, realizing that as time goes on the price of fuel will tend to rise and thus the margin between duals and wide base tires moves more and more towards the wide base side.

I'll admit, since I wouldn't consider using recaps for drives I had not considered someone going that route so your per-tire cost would be lower. Assuming your out-of-pocket cost for a full set of such tires would be on the order of $1,800 or so with the dismounting, mounting, balancing and the like the difference would be roughly $8,500 in favor of wide base, again according to the numbers I supply above. If you expect to receive 420k miles of service from your recaps this would save you one set of tires in about 1.26 million miles vs changing out fresh wide base rubber every 300k, for a savings of $1,800, bringing the difference to roughly $6,300.

As far as fuel savings vs relative rolling resistance, according to Michelin you're a lot further away than a tenth of a MPG with the tires you mention... according to their own data on their own site.

Good luck,

Jim