Noisy Michelin tyres

[mayhewga]

After doing 130,000km in my 07 KXR, I have just bought 4 new tyres.

The original Grandtreks did 60,000 and the replacement set also Grandtreks did a little more because I drove on less gravel.

I was very happy with the tyres as they were very quiet, worked well on stoney roads and never let me down, but come this time I found I could fit Michelins for the same price and as they promised quieter running, better fuel economy and longer life, I figured I couldn't go wrong.

Well it turns out that after just 2000km, it seems I have been hoodwinked by Michelin's advertising.

The Latitude Tour HP tyres are dreadfully noisy on all but the smoothest types of bitumen, to the point of giving me a headache, and my fuel usage has increased by 5%. I will have to see whether their 3rd claim of longer life is also a furphy.

Has anyone else had experience with these tyres?

[mayhewga]

I may have been a little hasty in my criticism of the Michelin latitudes.

I have just had them removed from my old '07 KXR 2wd and refitted onto the rims of my '12 KXR awd and now they are performing as I would have expected; they are now almost silent and appear to be returning better consumption, (I am getting the same consumption now with awd, when I was expecting higher consumption coming from 2wd.

I wonder if these tyres which I believe only came out a couple of years ago are "tuned" to suit the later model and awd configuration.

By the way, whilst they were still on the older 2wd, I went for a run out to Boulia and they performed very nicely on the dirt out there, including a rough climb through some old mining sites, so I will be interested to see how they perform on awd next time.