Redd

I think my car has heard the word "maintenance" and gotten jealous.
With four years and 16,000 miles on it, I went in for a brake fluid change today.
And of course it threw another TPMS warning as soon as I hit the parkway. Mentioned that to the service writer (because of previous TPMW lights) and THIS time, as we walked over to the tire in question, the screw head was dead obvious. OK, that happens. (Congress is SO resistant to passing screw control and licensing carpenters!)
Of course the dealer "isn't allowed" to fix tires, but they note (left the report in the car, going by memory) that my left tires are 5 and 4 mm tread left, the right are 3 and 4, they'd rather sell me four new tires. At 16,000 miles. While he was looking at tire options, he mentioned the OEM Dunlops aren't listed anymore. Uh, no, but Tirerack still lists them--with a feeble 200 tire life rating, compared to 400-600 on real tires. Ahem. Yes, I'm sure the Dunlops have some redeeming value, just not to me.

So AAA plugged it (I was going to ask the dealer to patch it, but if they're wearing out, why bother, the plugs actually last years) and that will let me look for tires at my leisure.

Last year they said you never need to rotate...this year he said the right side tires always wear more because that's the side the quattro systems engages power to first?! But if I'm lucky the next set won't be unidirectional (as my last tires were) and I'll be back to rotating them.

With that out of the way I continues with errands, and got another warning light STOP ENGINE AND CHECK COOLANT LEVEL! which I boldly and foolishly ignored until I was parked again. If that big bottle of red stuff is my coolant...it might be down one ounce in the half gallon. For this I need a STOP ENGINE! message?

It is always something. Always some niggling something. I guess that's why some folks just do the 3-year lease and "only" have to worry about the bills.

shokhead

Can you put directional tires on a car that didn't come with them and the other way, unidirectional on a car that came with directional?

MurrayA4

Yes shokhead there's no limitation on swapping from one to the other.

shokhead

Good to know. Thought it could really screw with alignment.

Redd

With unidrectional, you can swap front/rear but not left/right. Well, not unless you also remounted the tires, because they have to face "clockwise" on the wheel rims, so to speak. Some actually have an arrow molded in and say "this way" [sic] to make it clear. The other PITA about unidirectional tires (and the opposite of unidirectional is simply "tires" AFAIK) is that you can't rotate the spare, if you're lucky enough to have a fill size spare. Rotating the spare (an X+spare rotation pattern) means you basically are getting 25% more tire life out of a "set" instead of just buying an expensive lump to keep in the trunk. Of course our Q pool toys make that impossible too. I think cars that don't have four or five interchangeable tires on them, are really track cars, or other special beasts not to be pawned off on the general public.