Tires, Continental HDL2 Eco +, thought?

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Bridgestone is the best brand of truck tire in my opinion. Since the days of the m726, they’ve outperformed everything. I see Michelin tires mentioned on this site regularly. The biggest issue I know of with Michelin truck tires is their crappy bead design. If you crack or chip a Michelin or bfg bead, the tire must be scrapped. Non repairable/vulcanizable bead design. Just about every other tire brand has a repairable bead (within reason). I’m also seeing premature aging on Michelin sidewall rubber compound. Michelin has the tread compounds figured out though. Bridgestone had that problem back in the mid to late 90’s but have since corrected it. While I’m at it, Goodyear is not very tolerant to being run flat. The steel cord they use fatigues and weakens faster than any other tire brand I’ve seen. Goodyear is most likely to experience a zipper rupture when run flat. We used to section repair hundreds of tires per month. Most were run flat before we got our hands on them and repaired them. We would mount and air up each one to around 120 psi after the repair as a burst test. While inflating these tires, few that would show the signs of broken sidewall cord were usually a Goodyear or a Kelly brand. You would think that Michelin and Goodyear would’ve corrected these problems since they are regarded as two of the three major brands in the world.

Southern Tire Mart is a great company. Awesome success story. I know Jim and Tommy Duff personally. Very aggressive company. The Duff brothers have built a huge empire. They now own kllm, ffe, TL Wallace in Mississipp and who knows what else by now. Tommy even bought the auto dealerships that he used to buy all their pickup trucks from. Heck, tommy even bought the print shop that prints all their invoices, etc. I worked for them in sales in the mid nineties. I remember a 200 tire deal that was quoted out by our competitors at 60 bucks per tire under our cost. Tommy told me “sell the tires at a loss. Just get the sale and I’ll make it profitable!” The duffs sold out to TDS back in the day. Overall, TDS was a huge failure. TDS eventually sold back to STM. Tommy looked at their operating statements and was shocked at how much the company was spending on area managers or supervisors. The first thing he did was fire the area management guys, bought a corporate jet and personally visited three stores per day until they made the stores profitable again. Now these brother have a small fleet of jets. They recently bought a new gulfstream g450. Must be doing something right!