Understand the Average Lifespan of a Road Bike Tire

Video Transcript

"Depending on how soft the rubber is on your tire and and how much rubber you have on the sidewall, your tires can wear out from anywhere from a thousand miles to two or three thousand miles. You don't need to use an odometer and keep track of every mile that you ride. You can simply look at your tire. The tire that I have here on the front of my bike that is in my left hand right now is still really usable. IF you hold it up and spin it, you still that it's still nice and round across the top. It doesn?t have any flat spots or anything. And when you get close and look at it again you see that it doesn't have any real big holes from rock drilling or anything like that. And the other thing that you do is you check the sidewall. And you want to make sure that you don't see any places where it is threadbare or the tube is poking out or anything like that. You can see this tire has seen some use, and has been nicked with some outdoor conditions because it's faded here on the hot patch. But if we compare that to the tire that I have on the rear of my bike, we're going to see a lot more prominent wear. The first thing that I notice is the threads are starting to become apparent on the sidewall here. And then when I sight the tire from the top, I see that it's got some flat spots in it; which is a good sign of wear. And when a tire gets a flat spot like that, it starts to steer a little bit oddly. And then now when I look real closely at the tread, I see that I've got a lot more rock drilling and thin spots on the rubber that I do on the other tire. So, I'd probably say that within the next hundred fifty, two hundred miles, I should replace this tire just for safety's sake. We also see that some threads are starting to come off the sidewall which is not something that you want to go for. So I could replace this tire with a training-specific tire that would cost about forty dollars, and would be a pretty long lasting, high performing tire. Or I could spend up to eighty or a hundred dollars for a single tire that's not going to last as long but it will ride a little bit faster for that period that I can ride it."