Grooved roads and cheap tires

[bad tire purchase]

Howdy,


I put a set of Falken Ziex ZE 912 tires on a Honda Accord and they are terrible on grooved highways ... Anybody know if the annoying side-to-side motion can cause damage or excessive wear and tear to the car in any way? (or should I find another reason to blow another $500 on less annoying tires?)
Thanks!

[speediva]

Hmmm, Falken has a pretty solid reputation, but I always found they wore unevenly on my Infiniti G20.

So you're saying the car almost floats on grooved roads?

[bad tire purchase]

Thanks for the reply, Speediva ...

Yep, floats is a good way to put it. Just a constant to and fro motion as the tread tracks the road grooves. The tires are fine on smooth roads, gravel and in the rain ... not great on ice, which I suspect is because the rubber is so hard (that's what I get for falling for the 65K warranty).

[MagicRat]

I think your problem lies elsewhere, and is not the tires.

I am a big believer in having an alignment done whenever I buy new tires. Periodic alignments and a thorough check for worn suspension components is important.

Imho your handling problem may well be due to a poor alignment (too much toe-out) and/or worn components, such as tie rods, bushings, ball joints etc.

Other possibilities...... I presume the tire size is the same as stock, inflated properly (NOT to the max rating written on the tires) and you have stock rims, right? Wider-than-stock tires can cause wandering.

FWIW I looked through about 40 reviews of these tires on-line. Nobody mentioned wandering as a complaint issue. But they did say these tires wear out pretty fast, 12,000 - 50,000 miles, so the 65K warranty you have is probably a good thing.