Falken Rocky Mountain and Wild Peak Tires FTL

[white_n_slow]

I'm not too active on the 4Runner forum anymore, but I thought it might be wise to share a bit of experience with Falken AT tires for the benefit of others that might be searching.

It is my personal opinion that these are the most poorly designed AT tires on the market by a significant margin. That is for one specific reason: the latteral sipes and grooves on the tire only run approximately half as deep as the directional grooves. What this means in practical terms is that a tire that looks like this brand new:

...ends up looking like this less than half the way through its tread life:

I'm no engineer, but I have no idea why they would find the latteral sipes and grooves so trivial that they would only need to go half way in terms of tread depth. But I can say in recent snow storms I have seen a fair number of jeeps in the ditch and at least a few had half-worn falken tires.

/

 

[white_n_slow]

here is a more literal illustration of the concept:

latteral grooves are worn away (still plenty of tread depth on the directional grooves) leaving only in-line grooves which do nothing in terms of poor-weather traction.

 

[UnderFire]

I've seen this first hand as well, what a terrible design flaw, I've heard many good things about the performance of the wild peak when it's new, but the actual usable tread life is abysmal.

 

[AZ4Running]

I really like Falken tires but the the Wildpeaks suck big time. More like an agressive HT tire than an AT tire. They look cool but thats about it and are pricey. I hear they do really bad in mud, soft dirt or sand.

 

[Doc2012]

I ran those for a couple years before input my 35s on, and loved them.

Never had a single problem out of them. Did great in mud, rocks, everything i put them through.


I'll probably put them back on when I get the Runner going, just in 35s.

 

[Millerad1651]

I've had mine for 20k miles or so, and not a single problem. It looks like the tire posted above had excess wear on the outside edge. Mine look nothing like that.
I've been offroad numerous times and the only time they struggled was thick clay...not sure what AT would breeze through that.
We got 8' of snow last night and I had no problems driving around with them.
YMMV.

 

[csp]

Regardless of how the OPs have worn, that doesn't change the fact that EVERY set of these will turn into what amounts to a highway rib tire after a certain amount of wear.

Sure they may work great when they have tread, but they will perform poorly once the crossbars and siping is gone. Nobody can change that, regardless of how happy they are with them currently.