Excellent handling but average ride and quality
Written: Oct 15 '06
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Low price, good traction, decent ride
Cons: Limited tread life, difficulty in keeping the tires balanced.
The Bottom Line: Good budget tire but limited life.
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| backwoodsbum's Full Review: Falken Ziex ZE-512 Performance Tire |
I purchased a set of Falken Ziex ZE-512 tires to replace the worn out Goodyears on my 2004 Toyota Camry last winter and now after 40,000 miles I feel qualified to give a thorough report on these tires.
First off, I bought these tires from Discount Tire Direct. You can read an earlier opinion I wrote about this company here:
http://www.epinions.com/content_86567325316
Since that review was written I have made a number of other purchases from them and can't recommend them highly enough.
Anyway, back to the tires. As others had noted, these are fairly heavy tires. Two disadvantages to a heavier tire are heat buildup (which may lead to premature failure), and high rotating mass (which can hurt fuel economy). One might assume that a heavier tire is built sturdier but this is not necessarily the case.
Once I had the tires mounted and balanced I immediately noticed one thing that definitely goes in the plus column, very few weights were needed to balance these tires. My dad used to manage a Goodyear store and I helped him mount and balance many tires and it's not uncommon to find brand new tires that are so badly out of balance that they need to have several ounces of weight added to get them to balance. The fewer weights you can use the better because adding weights only makes an already heavy tire even heavier.
Now for the performance test. First a warning, I drive fast. Very fast. My office is 90 miles from my house so I have a 189 mile commute each day. What this means is that the ties on my cars are subjected to two stretches of sustained high speed driving each day. After a few days I noticed the outer edges of the tread showing signs of heat related wear. This was the only wear related issue until I got closer to 35,000 miles at which point it became apparent that these tires would not last much longer. Now, at 40,000 the tread is almost completely worn out and the tires are being replaced. These tires have no claimed mileage but I have heard people saying they got 60,000 + and I just don't see it. These tire probably would last longer if you do a lot of "around town" driving but the long stretches of high speed driving that I do has taken it's toll on them.
Another issue that I have had with these tires is that although they were easy to balance, they are next to impossible to keep balanced. I had less than 10,000 on the tires when one began to shake regularly. I rotate the tires frequently so it was easy to isolate which tire was shaking. I took it and had it balanced again and this time it required more weights than it originally did. A couple of weeks later the shake was back, only this time it was a different tire. This time I took all four tires and had them balanced and all were significantly out of balance. From that point until now I have had to re-balance all four tires about every 10,000 miles.
The final issue I had with these tires was two weeks ago when a belt separated as I was going down the interstate. Pretty sure the excess heat build-up these tires seem prone to lead to this failure since there was no obvious reason for the problem. Since the tires were nearing the end of their usable life I decided to replace all four.
On a positive note, my fuel mileage was better with these tires than with the original Goodyears even though the extra weight would seem to make these tires less efficient. Traction in both wet and dry conditions was excellent until the tread was worn to approximately 1/2 of the original depth at which point wet traction decreased but dry traction stayed excellent.
Summary:
For the money these are pretty good tires. The ride about average and get good traction, but I wouldn't rate them very highly due to the balance issues and the limited life.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 250
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Epinions.com ID:
backwoodsbum
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Member: Clark Ware
Location: Morrison, TN USA
Reviews written: 14
Trusted by: 2 members
About Me:
I'm 36 years old, married 7 years, no kids.
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