First, we got a new name. SprinterCanDiaries. Joking. But seriously, Outside Magazine Online recently featured us as one of their 24 Favorite Camper Vans! Even though our name was misspelled, we were very excited and thankful to be recognized. We had put a lot of time and effort into designing and building this van and it felt very nice to be featured!
Tires:
Ahead of heading into Mexico in the next two weeks, we got new tires for the van! After some research and shopping around, we opted to go with the BF Goodrich All Terrain T/A KO tires 245/75/16. We didn’t upsize the tires. They’re pretty beefy, but road noise isn’t meaningfully louder on these and hopefully our gas mileage won’t go down too much.
One thing we were happy to learn about the storage of the spare is that in order to get it out, you actually have to open the rear doors so stealing the spare tire isn’t all that simple.
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- BF Goodrich All-Terrain T/A KO
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- BF Goodrich All-Terrain T/A KO
I’m thinking of getting these same tires for my trip to Mexico! But I’m wondering what the effect on your gas mileage was. Any chance you can update on how the tires are working out for you? Thanks!
Ryan,
We like the tires a lot – they’ve made a big difference for traction. We also felt the tires were puncture resistant (nothing in the first 25k miles, 2 holes towards their end of life, and quite a bit of rough roads in between). They also made the ride generally a bit softer. Gas mileage got impacted by about 2 mpg, so there’s definitely a cost associated with the improvement in traction. Another cost factor is that our first set of BFG tires lasted only about 30k miles, so we had to buy a new set in Chile.
For the future, I would consider the T/A KO2 version as BFG has made a number of improvements on them.
Jakob