When buying new tires for your vehicle, choosing the right tire brand is of paramount importance. Besides the fact that the quality of the tire determines its lifespan and performance, bad tires can even be a major safety hazard.
In fact, more than 13,000 tire-related crashes occur every year. Investing in the right tires will help you drive safer and significantly enhance your car’s performance.
This doesn’t necessarily require you to go for the most expensive tires. As a car owner, you must note that some of the costlier tire brands actually do not deliver value.
While you’ll definitely want to figure out which tire brands are the best, it is equally important to know which ones you need to steer clear of.
Worst tire brands In 2022
Before choosing a tire brand, you need to ensure that they are reliable. This involves a number of factors, including their manufacturing processes, quality standards, and the actual performance of their tires. We have listed the worst tire brands in the world below, to help you understand which brands to avoid and why.
1. Geostar
Although Geostar makes a good impression, it actually borrows its reputation from Nankang the company which owns the brand. Nankang itself is a tire manufacturer too, and although their tires aren’t the best, they’re still good enough and they come at affordable prices.
While Geostar offers very cheap tires too, the quality of their tires is far below Nankang’s. This makes Geostar’s tires particularly unsafe to drive on. While Nankang is still fine, we highly recommend avoiding Geostar.
2. Accelera
Established in 1996, this Indonesian brand offers a decent range of tires, including tires for passenger cars, racing, and off-roading. Such a wide range of products from a relatively new brand is indeed surprising, and even impressive to some extent.
However, just because a brand offers plenty of options, it isn’t necessarily a good choice. Although Accelera promotes themselves as a brand that offers high-performance road tires, the performance of these tires is actually quite poor. The grip is particularly bad, and you’ll struggle to drive safely on wet roads.
3. Goodride
Goodride is a brand under the Zhongce Rubber Group, and is relatively new in the market. Established in 1997, this brand offers a wide range of tires at cheap prices.
Their lineup mostly includes tires for commercial vehicles like trucks and buses, but includes passenger vehicle tires too.
Regardless, despite their decent variety of tires and competitive prices, Goodride isn’t a brand that we would recommend. These tires offer particularly poor traction and handling, and can therefore pose a safety hazard.
4. Chaoyang
Like Goodride, Chaoyang is a part of the Zhongce Rubber group too, but has been around for much longer. Established in 1958, this brand had initially gained quite a good reputation.
Their current lineup of products comprises tires for a wide range of vehicles, including cars, forklifts, and bicycles.
While Chaoyang’s bicycle tires are quite good, their car tires are sub-standard. This is possibly due to the brand’s lack of experience and refinement for car tires, as they had remained focused on bicycle tires for a long time.
5. AKS Tires
AKS Tires is a shady brand without much information available about them. We know nothing about the company manufacturing these tires, the location of their headquarters, or the technologies they use.
This is a major red flag – you do not want to buy your tires from such a suspicious brand. Besides this, the brand’s tires aren’t worth your money either. Even in dry conditions, the tires barely offer any traction. Their wet performance is even worse, and can easily result in an accident.
6. Trazano
Once again, a tire brand from Zonghce Rubber Group finds its place on the list of worst tire brands. Unlike other brands under Zonghce Rubber Group, Trazano is a US-based brand.
There are several reasons why one must avoid buying Trazano tires at all costs. Firstly, the treads suffer uneven wear, with the area around the center wearing out faster.
Trazano also falls behind in performance against much more reputed brands that offer tires at similar prices. Established only in 2009, this brand is still young. You will be better off buying tires from brands that have proven themselves over the decades.
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7. Sunfill
This brand resembles Trazano in the aspect that it is an American brand manufacturing its tires in China. This is a relatively young brand established in 2007 and does not have a lot of tire models to offer.
Besides their limited range of products, poor quality is a major issue with Sunfill’s tires too. In fact, these tires have one of the longest stopping distances among all tire brands.
Wet performance is even worse, and you’ll have a hard time driving safely in less-than-ideal conditions on these tires. There’s no reason to buy Sunfill tires when plenty of much more reliable brands are in the market.
8. Westlake
Westlake is yet another Zonghce Rubber Group that you need to avoid when buying tires for your car. It suffers the same problem as Goodride – cheap prices but poor performance.
While Westlake’s tires are extremely affordable, the brand advertises them as safe for the local market. Now, here’s the issue: The local market is China, which doesn’t have the same standards and inspection procedures as Europe or the US.
This allows Westlake to skimp on quality to lower the production costs. Although the tires still deliver somewhat fine performance at slower speeds, they offer almost no grip when driving fast.
9. Compass
Compass is a brand selling a mixed range of products, including passenger car tires, bicycle tires, and car parts from various other brands. While durability and comfort aren’t major issues with this tire brand, performance certainly is.
It doesn’t look like Compass is going to improve their tires in the future either, as the brand entered the market in 1988 and there has been no improvement so far. Hence, it’s better to not purchase any tire offered by this brand.
10. Triangle
Established in Weihai, China, in 1976, Triangle is a tire brand that initially used to produce tires for sweeper cars in Indonesia. The brand gradually switched to manufacturing tires for passenger cars as the car market in China started to grow.
However, it wasn’t until 2000 that they started to take more serious steps to improve and produce better tires. Regardless, their tires are still of rather low quality, and barely offer any traction for safe driving.
They signed a contract with the University of Akron in 2011 to strengthen their R&D department and improve their tires. However, although they might get better in the future, for now Triangle’s tires aren’t very safe to drive on.
11. Autogreen
Although Autogreen tires might look like an attractive option due to their affordable pricing, they offer very poor value for money. These tires are of such poor quality that the tread barely lasts 20,000 miles, while an average tire should last 60,000 to 75,000 miles.
Besides being highly prone to wear, the treads offer almost no grip. Even in dry conditions, you’ll have trouble gaining traction on the road. Regardless of the season or weather, Autogreen tires deliver very poor performance.
The poor material and build quality may also lead to safety hazards by causing the tires to burst while driving. Overall, this tire brand is bad in every aspect and using these tires can potentially put your life at risk.
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Why are Chinese tire brands bad?
As you might notice, most of the worst tire brands in the world are either Chinese or have manufacturing plants in China. This isn’t a coincidence.
Chinese tires tend to be of poor quality because China’s quality assurance and inspection laws aren’t as stringent as America or Europe. This enables Chinese manufacturers to slash their production costs by producing inferior-grade tires. The low cost of these tires allows Chinese brands to grab a major portion of the global market, with China exporting around 65 million tires every year.
How to identify a bad tire brand?
While you likely know of the best tire brands already and probably have a favorite choice too, not every tire brand is available at every dealership.
In case you urgently need to replace a tire and need to choose between brands you aren’t very familiar with, here’s how you can identify bad ones. You can also use the same factors to get an idea of the quality of a tire you already purchased:
1. Check out the rubber quality
One of the most prominent signs of a bad tire brand is that they’d use poor quality rubber to reduce their production costs. These rubbers are much thinner than tires from reputed brands, and thus carry a different feel.
Getting a feel of the sidewalls will help you get an idea of the quality of rubber used in manufacturing the tire. Poor quality rubber wears out and breaks easily, which reflects the tire’s durability.
2. Look for information
Reliable tire brands always provide various relevant pieces of information on their tires, such as the year of manufacture, the manufacturing process, etc. These usually remain engraved on the sides of the tire, often in the form of abbreviated codes.
When buying a tire from an unknown brand, check for such information. In case a brand has provided no or unclear information regarding the product, it’s better to buy a different tire.
While you’re at it, also check out the year of manufacture to make sure you aren’t buying a tire that has already worn out by staying in storage for too long.
3. Check the treads
As you may have noticed, tires have different tread patterns. This isn’t an aesthetic feature; the tread pattern actually has a major impact on the tire’s grip. Poorly designed treads also wear out faster, thus forcing you to buy new tires.
When buying a tire, make sure to check whether it has a good tread pattern. The leading tire brands offer treads that potentially can last as long as ten years.
4. Learn about their customer service
This crucial aspect applies to any brand, not just tire manufacturers. You should always get your tires from an established brand. These brands usually better understand how their customers feel about their products.
Accordingly, they make improvements to their tires or provide necessary support. Contrarily, dealing with a brand that offers poor customer service can prove to be quite frustrating.
5. Stay away from absurdly cheap tires
We do not necessarily mean that cheap tires are always bad tires. In fact, various affordable tires in the market offer much better performance than many of their costlier rivals.
However, if a tire brand doesn’t have a particularly great reputation and their prices seem too cheap, you should take it as a warning sign. While an expensive tire isn’t always your best choice, a cheap tire from a lesser-known brand is usually of poor quality.
6. Test the performance
In case you have purchased a bad tire, it should become evident from the performance itself. Most of the bad tire brands are substandard in this aspect, with their tires barely offering enough grip.
These tires might also be particularly noisy while driving. In case you unknowingly bought such a tire, you might want to replace them with better options for the sake of safety.
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Conclusion
Now that you know which tire brands are the worst, you can easily avoid them when purchasing new tires. Regardless, it is a good idea to buy your tires from leading brands like Michelin, Goodyear, Continental, etc. anyway.
These tires not only offer superb performance, but are also very durable. Investing in a good tire can save you the cost and the hassle of replacing it in a few years.
