Firestone Wilderness AT

I bought a 00 Classic XJ a few months ago and it came with Firestone Wilderness AT 255/70/16 tires. They are in good shape still but I managed to knock a whole in the sidewall in one of them while up in the mountains.

I'm not a huge fan of these tires. I used to have 30" Dunlop AT on my old jeep and really like them a lot. The Firestones just don't have much grip but do well on the highway. Also, I'm nervous about that whole recall scare a few years back. My old man had the tread come off on a couple of them on his Crown Vic and they refused to reimburse him or even pay for the damage that was done to the car. In fact, I'm not even sure if his tires were under the famous recall.

How do I find out if these tires are part of the recall or even how old they are? Right now, I'm riding the fence on whether or not to just replace with one tire or get a whole new set of different tires. I'm a little leery of getting one new tire that'll be a tad larger than the rest of the used tires anyway.

the big problem w/ the wilderness ats was on exploders.

ford reccomended running them at 28psi.

it made for a good ride (best in class according to some magazine) but it heated up the sidewalls so much that they exploeded.

you know if you take a paperclip and bend it repeatedly it will break? same principle.

they made that low PSI reccomendation based on that magazine's best in class ride distinction.

I honestly wouldn't worry a huge deal about tread separation, or sidewall explosions or anything like that. it was a few isolated incidents blown out of proportion by a media frenzy.

btw, I had a set on my 78 powerwagon, and I was quite happy with them. aside from the issues w/ traction, they rode well, wore well (I ran 'em till the cords were showing) and never had a blowout.

IMHO, they're a better tire than the BFG a/t

CheapXJ said:

Honestly wouldn't worry a huge deal about tread separation, or sidewall explosions or anything like that. it was a few isolated incidents blown out of proportion by a media frenzy.

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I don't think it was blown out of proportion. As of May 2001, the govt estimated that 178 people have died at the result of these tires. Also like I said earlier, my old man had a couple of Firestone tires on a Crown Vic fail...the tread came off while my sister was driving and when my old man was driving. He has since removed the other two. These tires were not part of the recall and it makes me wonder if there problem isn't more widespread than they think.

I checked with a Firestone dealer and he said my tires weren't part of the recall (still makes me nervous though after what happened to my family...my dad was pretty anal about tire pressure).

So my big question now is it okay to get a tire that's the same size, even the same model, that has a different amount of tread wear for a 4x4? How close should I be in order to avoid any excessive wear to my drive train?

I had Firestones on my 3/4 ton 92 Dodge Diesel with a camper. The sales person said the hiway tires for my truck had no problems. I went through 2 blowouts and 2 tread loses On the OEM size before the sales person said they were good tires and maybe I should go to their next larger tire as it was higher rated. 3 tread loses and 1 blowout
later I trade the remaining 3 tires (like new less than 3,000 miles on the oldest) for Big Os making sure the the dealer understood the problems I had with the Firestones. This all took place in 19 months and 15,000 miles. I sold the truck 6 months later (4,300 Miles) without any problems with the Big Os.

My 2 cents,

PS. I wouldn't put firestones on anything I own even if they were free!