[twriter]

For several years, I drive MINIs, which with their perky acceleration (especially in the turbo S) put plenty of torque on the front wheels. Yet tire rotation when I did oil changes--every 15K miles--was fine for overall tire wear.

Approaching 7500 miles in my Bolt, especially considering I'm not a "hard" driver, I'm disinclined to take time to bop into the dealer (especially because the dealer closest to me, the one I bought this Bolt from, doesn't even have its service bays open on the weekends, which means taking time from work) in what feels to me way too soon for this. What are the pros and cons of 7500 vs. 15K, what're people here doing, and if anyone's stretched out the recommended intervals, what has your experience been?

 

[p7wang]

I think it's more important to rotate every X miles and be consistent about it rather than by time. The goal is to have even wear, which is more of a function of mileage rather than time.

 

[Sibilance]

You don't have to rotate regularly, but don't be surprised if your tires don't last all that long.

7500 is a good number because it is a sizeable chunk of a modern tire's life time. Rotating every 1 percent of tire life time would be a waste of man hours for little benefit. Rotating at half of a tire's life span would allow too much uneven wear.

If you let uneven wear go too long, you are now rotating vastly different tires into different positions, possibly even putting dramatically better tires in the front rather than in the back, which is a big no no.

I know. It would be great if the car was completely maintenance free. However, this is such an easy and fast task, and will likely be something we do an any heavy four wheel vehicle in future.

I rotate between 5000 and 7500 miles and I tend to get above manufacturer suggested mileage out of my tires. That's from over 27 years of driving. When I first started driving, and tire life was shorter, it was every 5000 miles.

 

[California]

I rotate as soon as I see a difference in tread appearance front/rear, then at similar intervals thereafter. Works for me. All tires ran over 50k miles per set over the last few cars.

I would never take time off from work to go do a rotation, my leave hours are (were, I'm retired) more valuable to me than some small percentage of tread wear.

I've been using Les Schwab tire centers for replacement tires and balance/rotation. They are open Saturdays. And likely less expensive than dealer service. Better service than any dealer in my experience.

 

[zbrown]

At 7500 miles my front tires were down to 55% and the rears were 90% so it was definitely due for a rotation. I drive pretty hard, and mostly twisty roads so that level of wear is about what I expected.

 

[Sean Nelson]

All my vehicles have had front wheel drive and I've always used a pair of snow tires on the front wheels for about half the year. So front tire wear gets split roughly evenly between the summer tires and the snow tires, and I find that it balances out with the rear tires pretty well. So over the past 40+ years I've never bothered rotating my tires and it seems to have worked fairly well for me.

 

[redpoint5]

I usually rotate once a year when I change the oil. That said, I wear my tires bald and drive according to the road and tire conditions. In the past I've waited to rotate tires until the fronts had something like 20% tread left, and they went bald at approximately at the same time as the other tires.

The alternative is you can always purchase 2 tires at a time. The rotation is also meant to even out differences caused by alignment issues too though, so that's another reason to frequently do it, but more importantly, the alignment should not be the cause of undue wear.