- When it comes to life, people love choices.
And that's a fact, Jack.
It's why you can take a quick stroll
through your local auto parts store,
and find quite literally no shortage
of 12 different brands of the same weight of oil
for your pickup truck, from all sorts of companies.
The same can be said about tires
and choosing the right tire for your application
can be extremely tough to do, I get it.
I'm Dustin, dusti.co on Instagram and in today's video,
we're rolling down the highway to find out
are hybrid tires really worth it?
Let's get it.
Now, as we get into this one,
if you're looking for a slick new set of hybrid tires
or really, I mean, quite honestly, any tire.
Be that an all-terrain, a mud-terrain,
or anything in between,
you're gonna wanna check out customoffsets.com.
Not only do we have over 160, yes,
160,000 different wheels and tires in our inventory
ready to ship to your door in as little as seven days,
but also, if you decide that you maybe wanna pair them
with a new set of wheels or something because let's face it,
stock wheels are boring, dawg.
We'll even mount them and balance them for you.
So all you gotta do is just unwrap your package,
jack your truck up, zip the old wheels off,
put the new ones on,
and you are ready for the Walmart meet this Friday.
Enough about wheels and tires though,
let's talk specifically about hybrid tires.
According to some of the most recent numbers
that I've heard,
consumers purchase somewhere near two and a half billion,
yes, billion with a B, tires in 2021.
That's a lot of rubbers.
While a large majority of this is the passenger car market,
there is still a number of tires purchased
for the truck game.
While there are certainly a ton of options
for truck tires these days, this was not always the case.
Let's just hit the old rewind button there for a moment
and roll the tape back and let's just have a talk.
If we rewind all the way back,
the first pneumatic tire was invented by a guy
named Robert William Thomson in 1845.
See back then, rubber tires were, well, all solid rubber.
And while his air-filled tire worked great,
it was just too dang expensive back then
and it just never caught on.
It wouldn't be until 1888 when a Scottish inventor
patented a design for a pneumatic rubber tire,
but this wasn't for a car at all.
In fact, it was actually for a bicycle.
This design wouldn't catch on for another seven or so years
in the automotive market.
Until a guy that you might have heard of
by the name of André Michelin,
just one of the biggest tire names in the game right now.
And they were the first to use a pneumatic tire on a car.
A lot has changed since roughly 1900, in terms of tires.
And while I don't don't wanna completely bore you guys
with a history lesson on the industry,
I do think it's important to know
that the tire world is ever-changing.
Over the years, truck tires were really just divided
into three categories.
You had highway tires,
which is what you'd find on most OEM trucks.
You'd have a all-terrain tire,
most notably the BFGoodrich KO2.
And then of course you have the aggressively loud
and obnoxious, overly freaking complicated,
but still super bitchin' mud tires, right?
This would be the case for a number of years
with companies always tweaking and changing
and trying new designs and so on and so forth.
Always trying to make the tire the best tire
that they could because, well,
that's just what you do when you make products.
But as truck tire consumer demand grew,
there became a growing demand for a tire
that both looked good and functioned well.
A tire that would have enough lug and sidewall bite
to get you out of a sticky situation,
but also that rode smooth and was quiet on the road
and got you some good mileage.
And thus, the hybrid tire was born.
The definition of a hybrid tire is, well,
there really isn't one.
And it seem that everyone makes
just a little bit different hybrid tire than the next.
In terms of high hybrid tires though
what you're gonna find is
that most of them are a combination of a mud tire
and an all-terrain tire.
They just took them and stuffed them in a martini shaker
and just shook it around a little bit and bam,
you have a Ridge Grappler.
They're gonna feature a much more closed
center tread pattern than that of a mud tire,
but still have significantly bigger and deeper tread blocks
and voids than those of an all-terrain.
This really helps the tire be
kind of the best of both worlds.
It's gonna ride well.
It's gonna give you plenty of mileage life,
but it also is gonna have the traction you need
if you find yourself in things like mud,
or sand, or snow, or dirt,
or a really sticky situation when your buddy
bets you that can't run your truck across the back 40
'cause it's really wet.
Not that I would know.
For a long time, the hybrid tire game was owned
by the Nitto Ridge Grappler.
And even still today,
the Ridge Grapp is still a solid option
if you're looking for an all around
Swiss Army Knife style tire for your truck.
With that being said though,
over the last 18 years
and really over the last 18 months specifically,
we've seen a ton of hybrid tires pop up in the market.
We're talking Toyo, Mickey Thompson, Radar,
and a ton more have brand new hybrid tires
that just look awesome and have been performing well
in all of the tests.
One of our most recent favorites is the Radar Renegade RT.
Now this bad boy is a pretty new tire
in terms of overall hybrids,
but it's going off with a straight bang.
It's got those parallel aggressive center tread blocks.
It's got plenty of voids
to get any water and dirt out of your way
if you find yourself off the pavement.
And it's got that bitchin' sidewall design
that just looks so damn good.
Dustinn actually just put a set,
and I say Dustinn
'cause he's got two N's in his Instagram, @dustinn.
But anyway, he just put a set on his Silverado
and he absolutely loves how they perform,
how they ride, and the overall general tire performance.
One thing to keep in mind when it comes to hybrid tires
is that not all hybrids are designed the same.
They're not all created equally.
Because there's no standard
on what makes a hybrid tire a hybrid tire,
you're gonna find all sorts of different tread patterns
and designs and tread depth and stuff like that.
Road noise, that they're all different, right?
You're gonna see house all the way
from like a more nobby gnarly
almost mud tire looking thing called a hybrid,
all the way over to more of like a all-train tire.
Because of this, we do recommend shopping around
to see which tire truly fits the style
that you're looking for best.
And ultimately, which one is gonna give you the performance
that you're actually looking for.
At the end of the day though, the question is,
are hybrid tires worth it, right?
That's the one you guys wanna know.
So, the answer is you guessed it, it depends.
If you're looking for a solid daily driver type tire
that you know will have your back if you find yourself
in a little bit more of a sticky situation,
but still gonna ride smooth and quiet down the highway,
then a hybrid might be for you.
But that's enough out of me,
what do you guys think?
Is a hybrid tire for you?
Are they worth it?
Let us know down in the common section below.
And as always, be sure to subscribe if you haven't already.
With that, I'm Dustin and I'll see you guys around.
Peace.
(upbeat music)