Nissan Patrol 4x4 (Africa)

I considered posting these questions separately, but together they'll influence my decision.

1. I'm confronted with two problems. The first is, do I get MT or AT? The muddies look the part, and might serve me better off road. Did I mention they look the part? I also plan on driving to work and back and doing long distance trips that may not be 4x4 related. Should I just go with my heart and get the muds or will they haunt me for the next 50 - 80k km?

2. I'm also not sure what to do about tyre rotation. On my Hardbody I just swapped the rear and front tyres. However, the spare has significantly more tread left and should one of the four suffer damage, the spare would only be suitable for the trip home to fit new tyres. There are mixed feelings on the interwebs about tyre rotation and some logistical issues if the tyres are directional. However, I do like the idea of wearing out the spare at the same rate as the other tyres. What are your thoughts. If you do a five wheel rotation, do you have directional tyres and how do you incorporate it? Obviously having two spares takes care of the logistics, but geez, buying five is already expensive.

My spare on the Patrol appears brand new. The spiky bits and chalk writing is still on the tread. Perhaps I can just by four KL71s and use the current spare but they are directional. If a rotation is recommended for all five, how do you manage it? Do you pop two tyres off the rim every 10 or 15k km?

285 75 16
Bf km2
Bf ko2
Cooper stmaxx
Cooper stpro
Good year with keflar side walls
Any tyre with strong side walls
My humble opinion use it or not
Barend by autowiel centorion west is die man vir roetasie en balance ...beter om te kyk na wear en dan te ruil volgens dit

I also prefer rotating through all five, and for that reason am leary about buying a roatational tyre.

I check wear and roatate accordingly. On my car, the fronts wear faster than the rears, and the rights wear faster than the left. So the "best" tire goes right front, the second-worst left back and the worst goes to spare.

If I had to run directional tires, I would do things differently because I am convinced pulling a tire off does some damage.

Whether or not to keep your existing spare tyre will depend on the date stamp on it. If it's more than three years old, I would personally buy 5. Also, if it's not the same brand and tread, it probably best to turf it. Different products will have different rolling diameters, even if nominally the same size, which could cause problems, not to even mention the issues of different grip levels during an emergency stop on wet tar...

As for type, Muddies are moisier and give a harsher ride than AT or even HT's. But when you really need a muddy, the others are just not in the same league.

As for brand, I'm not even going there.

Paul, muds are very pritty and thags one of the main reasons I got mine......they just look cool. They do make more noise, but who cares. In my opinion MT perform better "all round offroad" than AT, and thats the main reason I stick with them.

I rotate 5 tyres as it just makes more sense. You never know by the end of their life if you want to change brand and then you are stuck with one new tyre if you only rotated 4.

There are loads of theories about how to rotate, but I just leave it up to the tyre place to decide what goes where. Directional tyres have some drawbacks so if I can choose I will avoid them.

If I had the money to afford them I would go for Cooper ST Max as a AT or STT Pro as my first choice for MT.

Gerrit had a very wise thing to say a while ago
The best all terrain tyre is a mud terrain tyre.....
If the thing is if the road noise is to loud...your radio is to soft....or sell your patrol and buy a prunis .....

When a mud terrian tyre is noisy..your on the wrong road surface...

Muds are okay, had plenty of them. But they have significantly longer braking distances on wet tar. And I suspect that one gets a fair bit less mileage out of them than a normal road biased tread pattern. At least I did..

Cooper ST MAX AT have served me well.

They arent quite muddies, but very aggressive AT.

Double the kms of my last muddies.

I rotate every 5k, I use cross rotation - front to back & left to right.

I can also recomend Barend @ Autowiel Centurion West.

This is how I rotate mine (obviously not directional tyres): But I like Peter's reasoning with regard to wear vs rotation.

Peter Connan wrote: ↑18 Jan 2018 05:25 I check wear and roatate accordingly. On my car, the fronts wear faster than the rears, and the rights wear faster than the left. So the "best" tire goes right front, the second-worst left back and the worst goes to spare.

I also LOVE the look of a muddy. The KL71's are in my opinion the best aggressive looking muddy out there, with huge block patterns and crevasses. I did some wild things on my KL71's and never had any sidewall issue and actually found them a treat in the sand as they bulge nicely and in turn supply great grip. Alex, if I'm not mistaken has some KL71 on his Patrol and can give you some unbiased feedback on them too.

But back on point, I also use mine as a daily drive, and I found especially with the KL71's, were about 1L/100km heavier than the Kumho AT's I have on now. Road noise.... who cares.... I have heavy metal in my Iron Maiden anyway, and have you ever heard that played softly... . So far I have not had any major difficulty on the tracks, but yes they don't do what the muddies can do for sure. So a little extra care and precision is needed, but again nothing one cannot handle.

So for me, I decided to sacrifice kickass looks for better fuel consumption, considering the Km off road vs Km on road ( incl. overlanding gravel and mild offroading )

At the end of the day is a matter of personal choice.

I rotated 4 at a time on my muddies, luckily I never had the need to change a tyre.