TireRack.com, America’s largest independent tire tester and consumer-direct source for tires, wheels and performance accessories, today announced two tire industry-firsts designed to help improve the tire buying experience and provide consumers with more fuel efficient options. Fuel-efficient tires with Low Rolling Resistance properties are identified on the TireRack.com website and a vehicle fuel economy component has been added to its tire testing regimen.
These new consumer-information features allow shoppers to quickly identify tires designed to be eco-friendly, as well as see how tire choices can influence vehicle fuel-consumption.
The ability to sort TireRack.com’s thousands of tire offerings and highlight tires designed to be low rolling resistant and energy efficient will allow consumers interested in fuel economy to narrow
their search by characteristics that are most important to them.
The new fuel economy component of TireRack.com’s test reports provides consumers with real world data to determine which tires save the greatest amount of fuel and how that translates into their daily driving style. For instance, in recent tests TireRack.com determined that the impact of fuel savings for a BMW 3 Series driven 15,000 miles a year could be as much as 30 gallons.
With the average price of fuel at $2.75 a gallon, a consumer can save a total of $80 annually by outfitting a mid-sized sedan with the most efficient of the tires tested. Typically conducted from May to September when roads are clear of snow, the TireRack.com standard 6.6-mile Real World Road Ride is used to evaluate the ride comfort, noise quality and the everyday handling consumers experience on the road. Full test results can be seen here:
www.tirerack.com/tires/tests/testDisplay.jsp?ttid=129.
“TireRack.com is the number one consumer authority for the tire buying process,” said Matt Edmonds, vice president of TireRack.com. “Consumers are increasingly being bombarded with messages about fuel consumption and efficiency from vehicle and tire manufacturers and it’s our mission to sort through the data and tell them what matters most.”
By understanding most consumers find buying replacement tires a mundane, often confusing task, TireRack.com began testing the tires it sells more than 15 years ago to empower consumers to
make an educated tire buying decision, while making the process fun. The core group of tire testers is TireRack.com’s team of nearly 100 phone specialists, the Sales Team, who spend time on the track as well as a real-world-road loop evaluating tires as part of an 80-hour annual curriculum at Tire Rack University, the company’s in-house sales and product continuing education program.
The results are then posted free of charge on the Tire Research Tab on www.tirerack.com. With more than 150 different consumer tire brands sold in the U.S. aftermarket in 2009, TireRack.com continues to strive to be the best one-stop research destination and shopping solution for tires and wheels. To view how tests are conducted, visit TireRack.com’s Video Center
at www.tirerack.com/videos.