Ask The Community

All things considered, rotating your tires is beneficial in extending their service life - but by no means do you have to pay the dealer's labor rates to accomplish this. A local wheel/tire shop typically has lower overhead than a dealership and will charge less for this service. Alternately, you can elect to have this done free of charge when your car is in for a brake service and/or suspension service - really any service in which they must remove the wheels - since pulling the wheels on and off is part of what you are already paying for. Alternately, you can invest in a floor jack, jack stands and a torque wrench and do it yourself. The investment will pay off in the long run.

5/5 users found this helpful.

Car was just serviced at the dealer. Asked them about rotating tires. Say they no longer do this for BMWs. Not true?

0/0 users found this helpful.

I used to rotate my tires but I have stopped doing so for the last 3 years I own my BMW 328i. The reason is that I did a cost/benefit analysis and in the long run it was cheaper to not rotate the tires.

The rear wheels of my BMW wear much faster than the front wheels since it is a rear wheel drive vehicle. The rear wheels wear out twice as fast as the front on average. I used to rotate the tires at every 5k miles, and every other rotation requred a wheel balancing as the wear patern is different on the steering wheels comparede to the rear traction wheels.

What I do now is replace the rear tires when they wear out, which is about half life for the fronts, and them drive until all four need replacing, which occur at about the same time. Difference is I don't have to jack the car and rotate the tires myself anymore, no more money spent balancing wheels, or wasting time at the auto shop. I'm not going through tires any faster than when I used to rotate them.

3/3 users found this helpful.

I believe when you check your owner's manual, BMW does not recommend rotating tires.
I think it's got something to do with their setups.

2/2 users found this helpful.

Most BMW's have offset tire sizing. meaning the rear tires are different sizes than the fronts. This is typical with the "sport package" and other performance packages. Thus, rotating the tires is not possible. To add to that issue, the tires on all BMW's that I am aware of are "directional", meaning they are designed to rotate in one direction only.

So, to "rotate the tires" at all, you would have to demount the tites from the wheels, and only be able to move the right rear to the left rear, following the same rotation direction, and the right front to the left front, and vice versa. The cost to do this would far overshadow any benefit in wear or mileage service for the tires. In fact, it could result in poor handling and a potential for sacrificing ride quality.

On some lower line BMW's, where the tires are all the same size, they are still directional, so yes you can rotate them. They have to go front to rear only though, and not cross rotated as you used to do with non-directional, non-radial tires.

To further muddy the waters, the manufacturers of the run-flat tires on almost all BMW's today don't recommend roration.

So, there in a nutshell, you have it, Inflate carefully, use the correct pressure (I inflate to 1 lb over the recommended pressure for normal driving; 2 lbs over for extended highway driving) check your tires with a quality gauge when they are cold in the mornings, reset your pressure indicator on your instrument panel aftewards, and never depend on that TPM system in the car to tell you that you are a few pounds low. By the time it warns you are low, you likely have a flat and will need a new $400 tire.

Happy Motoring courtesy of the Safety Doc!

4/4 users found this helpful.