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TIRE FAQQ. Why are the name brand tires often much cheaper at the mass merchandisers? A. Large chains such as Costco, Sears, Montgomery Ward as well as others, are large enough to have branded tires made expressly for them to sell. So while you often will see a Michelin special at one of these stores these tires are not the same tires we sell but generally are of a lower quality. There is also a great deal of tire substitution going on at many tire sales locations wherein a lower “speed” rating is quoted out in an ad or on the phone and making it appear as if the same tire is available at a much lower price. You may even be told there is a tire “just as good as yours” but at a lower price. Nonsense. There is very little profit left in tire sales because the market place is so competitive. The result is you are often not buying the tire you should be getting but rather a tire that is more profitable to the sales person who can then throw in “free” mounting and balancing to lock a deal up. Q. Should I get snow tires for my car? It came with all season tires and the salesperson told me they are good all year round. A. All season tires are generally terrible in the snow after their first year on the car. After that the tread gets slightly worn and doesn’t work well in the snow. All cars, whether they are front wheel, rear wheel or four wheel drive need snow tires for New England winter driving. If you depend on your car during the three winter months when it snows around here you should have snow tires. Period. Q. Why does it cost so much to get tires mounted or balanced here? A. Good question! The cost of the equipment to correctly mount and balance high performance, run flat and low profile tires is very expensive. The combined cost of the two machines we use to perform the mounting and balancing of your tires is over $20,000. Most local shops don’t have this equipment or, if they do have it, don’t use it properly because it takes too much time to do the procedure correctly to get the results we insist on. How do we know this? Because we are often asked by our customers to correct tire vibration/shimmy problems caused by other shops. Oftentimes we are even asked to do the mounting and re-balancing for other shops when they need to correct the vibration problems they run into after selling a set of tires.
Q. Can I bring tires to Auto Engineering and have them mounted and balanced? A. For saftey reasons, Auto Engineering will not install customer supplied parts, including tires. Once you find the set of tires that you are interested in buying from Tire Rack, call us at Auto Engineering with the part number, and we will order the tires for you to be shipped to our Lexington shop A CHALLENGE TO OUR CUSTOMERS Bring in any four tires you have saved money on and had mounted and balanced at a chain or mass merchandiser with their “Free Mounting and Balancing!” special. Let us check the tires on our Hunter Road Force machine and show you the results. If we can’t improve the ride of the car we will give you a free oil change. But, if we can show you via a computer printout and road test improvements in your car’s ride you promise to buy your next set of tires from us. |
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