Pointman’s Page

With the high cost of gasoline many including myself have been using motorcycles to take advantage of 40-60mpg. But as I hit 9k on the VTX and order a set of tires I started crunching a few numbers.

Motorcycle tires have incredibly short lifespans compared to car tires. So taking the average cost of a set of tires against the average mileage life and calculating the cost per gallon of gasoline… is not a pretty sight.

Using my VTX and Ford Taurus as examples since both recently needed tires so the info is in my head. Taurus first, it costs me $0.23 per gallon (27mpg, 55k tires for $470 or $0.008 per mile) additional to cover tire wear. The VTX, on the other hand, costs me a whopping $1.25 per gallon (40mpg, 12k tires for $374 or $0.031 per mile) to cover tire wear!

Worse is that if I had bought these same tires for the VTX locally, instead of ordering them from Direct Line USA I’d have paid an additional $183! That’s $0.046 per mile or $1.86 per gallon in tire wear. Assuming the reports of the Avon tires making 12k holds up.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 5th, 2007 at 7:54 am and is filed under Motorcycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.