The van was about 3 years old and the tires still had good tread. Over the years I have learned that tires do wear and get damaged on the inside as well as the outside. A common wear area is at the side of the tread where the steel belts end. On RV-truck tires the steel belts often go through the sidewalls also. When the outer casing becomes porous water gets to the steel belts and they begin to rust. The rust expanding will destroy a tire. I lost a tire on my last motor home that way. The rusting belt was obvious where the tire blew out. To my surprise Goodyear covered it and that was with almost 50K on it. 

On my current RV I had to replace the front tires at 32K due to belt separations causing ride disturbance. I replaced them with Continentals that were $100 less each then the Michelins and I also replaced the 255/80-22.5 with 275/70-22.5. At 90K those Conti's are still holding up great. 

Dennis
  

-----Original Message-----
From: Vanagon Mailing List [mailto:vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com] On Behalf Of Larry Alofs
Sent: Friday, June 13, 2014 10:20 PM
To: vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM
Subject: Re: ok, now a tire question

My question is about the age of those tires.  I have had the same type of thing happen.  One came apart on I-80 in Ohio at 100F with my wife driving.
 I have to admit tho that those were very old Michelins.  The tread didn't seem to wear out so I kept running them.

Larry A.

On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 10:06 PM, Don Hanson <dhanson928@gmail.com> wrote:

> with one of them having a tread separation on I95 in Florida with my 
> poor wife driving.  That was at ~59K miles.
>
>   I don't like Michelins any more.   They seem to have a LOT of tread
> separations.  I have seen 5 tires on vanagons with goiters..People 
> give me old 14" wheels with tires and some have been sets of 
> Michelins...plenty of tread but bulges in the tires.  The "new" 97 
> Safari AWD came with two sets of Michelins...one set has two tires 
> with separations the other set only has one separation...That means I 
> have to toss out 8 expensive tires with good tread left and that sucks.
>