A tale of two (sets of) tires

When I bought my Civic Hybrid in 2010, it came with Dunlop tires. I've never had Dunlops on any of my cars before (all 5 of them over the years), so I had no reference point to judge them by. They didn't seem horrible. At first.

Almost as soon as I bought the car, I bought a set of winter tires on steel rims and swapped them out. That was November 2010. The Dunlops didn't go back on my Civic until the spring of 2011, then came off again in the fall of 2011, around early November. Then the Dunlops were back on again this spring in late March.

Now my car has 61,000km on it, so considering that they've only been on the car 12 months total out of 22 months. With equal mileage across each month (safe to say considering there have been no long trips anywhere), that means the Dunlops have seen 33,200km. Total.

I just swapped them out today. The tires had been showing their wear. Badly. The wear indicators were almost even with the contact patch, I'd say there was 4/32" and I'm being generous. After 33,200km! Like holy crap! My original plan was to hold off changing them until October when I would be ready to switch back to winter tires. The universe decided otherwise on my way in to work this morning. One of the tires went flat part way through my 40km commute. Well that's that.

I went back to my trusty Michelins yesterday. I opted for Primacy MXV4 all season. What a difference. Quieter. Smoother. Likely to go a bit further than 33,200km. It will be interesting to see if my mileage (currently averaging 5.2 l/100km) changes on the new tires.

Do I even need to declare that I will never buy Dunlop tires? Ever? I wonder if the fact that the car sat in the dealer lot for 11 months before it sold has anything to do with the premature wear......