Duratrac weak sidewalls... anyone have real evidence?

I think that was from when it blew out I was doing 65 had to slow down and get into the breakdown lane so it road on the rim for a little bit. Wasn’t under inflated. No tpms light on.

 

i'm on my second set. first was C rated 265/75r16 this new set is 285/75r16 E rated. run both fairly hard. fast on the highway, and take them offroad about once a month. no issues.

 

tyres are rated several different ways

load rating
grip
wear
the amount of rubber hitting the road or trail
the durability is determined by the carcass & number of plus
the wear rating ........... tyre compounds

the Duratracs may not meet Ur expectations
be true to the type of driving U do

my choice ALL hi-way HI mileage ALL weather HI speed
I switched to a 80k tyre straight up...........
I know exactly the type drivin Iv done....... no less the future
many overnite1k runs ..........sometimes more

mudder-grubbers just wont do
my setup would leave me stranded off road

good luck

 

Cooper AT3 isn't really in the same class. Duratracs are closer to Cooper ST Maxx in target usage i.e. between AT and MT tire.

 

Yeah, which is why I would prefer the Duratrac. However, the AT3 is a very capable AT tire that is available in a C rating at the size I want.

 

I haven't had any issues with mine, neither has a couple friends. We all run Load C. Myself (12 yrs auto tech experience) and my buddy (20+ yrs as and advanced diagnostics tech) have been in the auto repair industry for quite a long time and HATE Goodyear with a passion....except the Duratrac. I researched for months trying to find a better overall tire for the midwest (Iowa, so we normally get our fair share of snow) but simply could not. I wanted SOOOOO bad not to want the Duratrac because of my utter disgust for every other Goodyear tire I have driven on (personal or customer car), installed on customer cars or warrantied for various reasons. But the fact is I couldn't find a reason not to get them. I love them and will likely put them back on when I am due for new tires.

I also agree that I haven't seen enough first hand issues to steer me clear. In every incident of a side wall failure I have seen, most other tires would have failed also. Pick a tire and you'll likely find as many or more side wall failures. Considering all the service vehicles that use these they have to be a good choice, down time is money lost and companies can't have that. A lot of the times picking the right line and being smart will avoid most tire failure situations. Of course there are oddities and manufacture defects in every brand and model. We did a 5 day trip in the Black Hills of South Dakota and there is a good amount of sharp rocks, shale and sharp sticks/logs. We picked our lines considering we had to drive 8 hrs back home and came back with no mechanical issues.

The picture below is the best one I have on my work computer but you get the idea of what the Black Hills of SD is like.

 

Shit, random sawzalls in the trail?

 

Haha....yeah. We found ourselves on a trail that we shouldn't have really been on. In the Black Hills they are rated 1-5 but they aren't really posted anywhere. Anyways, later that night we found out that trail was a 3+. Meaning it is recommended to have 35"tires, front and rear lockers, rock sliders and undercarriage protection. Well, I had a 3rd gen TRD OR suspension (around 1" of lift in the front only), rear detroit tru-trac locker and 256/70R17's. So no where near the recommendations. lol Plus I have a DCLB....didn't help.

I was the lead in the group because if I couldn't make it, no one else would since i was pretty much the weak link. The other guy I mentioned above had a 2017 TRD Pro and we had a JK 3" lift pulling up the rear. We had to use a Hi-lift jack tethered to a tree and rock to pull the truck away from that rock pointing at my rear bumper. I ended up getting a little damage but nothing too bad. It was a lot of fun and the other 2 didn't have much of an issue because of the wheel base mostly.



This is the 3 of us after getting out of that tough spot!



This is the trail. Known as "Camp 5 trail" in the Jeep community. The fact that a mostly stock Tacoma DCLB made it through would probably surprise most of them. It was a challenge, not gonna lie. But the JK had zero issues and his has 18" wheels and no lockers. So I don't know why Jeep guys find this trail as a challenge.

 

Oh and this is a duratrac on a pretty sharp rock.....just saying. We had no issues between the 3 of us. The year prior I took my dirt bike up there for a few days with a group of buddies and we did about 90 miles of hard trails, mostly single track and most of us had new or newer tires on our bikes and the tires were trashed after that trip. Thats how rough some of the rocks are up there.

 

Great info! Thank you.

 

I know this thread has been dead for months, but I just wanted to add my recent experience.

I was driving on some pretty rough dirt roads with lots of big potholes and tons of sharp rocks. I was backing up through some decent sized rocks trying to park to set up my campsite and I slashed my sidewall open on a rock. It had a sharp edge sticking out and was just a little too close. This was with 265/75r16 load rating e. I can’t say if this proves the weak sidewall, but I always see people say it too. I was thinking about nitto ridge grapplers because I haven’t heard anyone complain, but like you said I don’t know of any REAL evidence to support it so I ended up buying a set of 285/75r16 duratracs.

 

I had a sidewall cut but it wasn't deep enough to puncture. Only ever did FSRs when hunting... I can also confirm after just a couple years of regular driving, they got really scary in the winter.... Personally, I wouldn't buy again.

 

I looked passed the duratrac for many years because of bad "experiences" I heard. It was the usual friend of a friend, saw a guy cut his on a easy trail. However, after running ST MAXX, Grabber AT2, WildPeak AT3W instead, I finally decided to give the duratracs a shot. Having multiple friends with a combined 300,000+ miles on them on various different vehicles, with no issues of cut sidewalls and raving reviews of the all around do anything performance of these tires. I do have one friend who personally did cut 2 sidewalls on his going through a road washout, where a broken steel culvert cut the sidewalls, which I feel that nearly any tires would get cut by as its similar to running a knife along the sidewall I currently have 12 months and a touch over 15,000 miles on mine, including about 3,500 off road miles. I summed up many of my thoughts in a review at 6700 miles, and am in the process of writing an update on that page. https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/another-goodyear-duratrac-review.648535/
But so far I have had no issue with the sidewalls, even running anywhere between 6-10 psi for any off road travel. Including on all the Colorado Granite and volcanic rock that is everywhere around where I live.

 

Awesome review, thank you!

 

But isn't it also normal that a tire would start to see a loss in performance as the tread wears, especially in winter conditions?

Personally, the reason I went with Duratracs again is that my first set were excellent in any conditions and they have the winter snow rating, whereas other tires in the category don't. Here in Seattle we don't see a ton of snow, but when we do it gets pretty slushy/icy on the roads and there are lots of hills. People say that ridge grapplers also do really well in snow, but they don't have the snow rating like Duratracs. They're both 50k mile tires, so for me the decision was either go with what I already know does well, or try something new based on conjecture that duratracs have weak sidewalls.

 

They still had quite a bit of tread left on them. Only had about 50,000km or 31,000 miles. Just my experience )

 

I ran them for a while but just didn't have confidence in them after having two issues. One blow out was during a three point turn in packed sand of all things...I was running maybe low 20 psi. The other was a weird issue where a key somehow got driven into the side of the tire at low speed. Got in my head, every time I was out in the dirt I was paranoid.

I also didn't find the traction off road to be anything spectacular. Not horrible but not great. They also chirped a lot going over paint in parking lots, not a big deal but another observation.

I put on Toyo RTs after and thought it was a much better tire. Never had any issue with them and ran them harder than the Duratracs too.

This is the one in the sand.


This is the key.