I went down to my local infiniti service dept and went on a road test with one of the technicians. The problem we wanted to diagnose was the tire roar in my front tires (05 coupe, 19"). I recently replaced my rears w/BFG KDW2s, so no noise coming from them.

The tech said that slight cupping is normal on this car with the bridgestone re050 tires. He continued to explain that each tread block wears on a slight angle, not flat to the ground (b/c it's a unidirectional tire), and so it results in an uneven surface driving on the road, after you wear the tire down some. According to the tech, an alignment will not help, because all of the coupes are doing this and the design of the tire makes it as such.

I currently have about 6/32" left on the fronts, and he suggested I 'live with it' b/c the tires are expensive to replace, especially if I don't really need to. I was looking at the possibility of toyo t1r for the front. I want to keep OEM sizes b/c its safe and I like the way the re050's front sizing looks (slight 'stretch' look).

My actual question is - what are you guys' opinions? Anyone experiencing the same issue? And what did you do about it - replace tires or just live with it?

performance tires are pretty noisy once they begin to wear. they are
quiet while new. it's just a sideeffect.

im running S03's on my car... pretty loud, but this is typical. im running
GS-D3's on my other car... pretty loud as well. normal for high perf tires.

I was told by the infiniti dealer that since the car is low, that the you will hear the tire roar more than normal cars, they also said is the type of tire that makes it noisy which i thought was bull, so i asked for what tire was silent, and told them that if the tire was noisy they would have to refund me the money for them and give me new tires which they declined to do since they knew all they were doing was trying to sell me some expensive tires...in other words i think we might have to live with the road noise

One thing you can do is dismount the tire & flip it on the wheel.
The fr left will now go on the fr right; & the right to the left.

This will put the worn inside cupped tread on the outside,
and will give you some noise relief as well as more wear.

I've noticed a big difference with my PS2 tires.
Much quieter that Toyo's & Yoko's I've had in the past.

The biggest design difference is that the PS2s are NOT unidirectional.
They do have an inside & ouside though... which means they can't be flipped on the rim.

Ok, so I'm having the same problem, but my tires are getting up there (19k miles). I want to replace them with a much quieter tire with decent performance, if not on-par road gripping to the REO50's. Anyone have specific recommendations from experience with the REO50's and another tire? I could buy the same tire again and it would be quiet for about 10k mi. or so, but I'd like to get a new tire that's quieter for longer.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

normal? thats BS. I've had numerious sets of performance tires in the past...BFG, Dunlop, Goodyear, Bridgestone and yes it's true they were not the quietest tires around but the amount of roar coming off of the stock tires is rediculous. These tires make more noise then my All Terain 32" truck tires. It's definitely related to the stock suspension setup with to much camber. All 4 corners of my car are wearing significantly faster on the inside edges. When people ride in my car they always comment that it sounds like a wheel bearing is going bad or something. Way to much tire noise.

After these performance tires wear there is some extra noise. I have Michelin PS1. It is amplified if you have the kind of wear you are experiencing because of the design and aggressive camber our cars have. I had my fronts "flippped" as Intgr8r described to minimize the shortened life of my "feathering" tires and to reduce tire noise. It helped some.

Why would you want differerent tires front versus rear?

Since you have BFG in the rears, once the fronts wear down, why not get BFGs int he fronts as well?

I had the same problem. Dealership says it's normal and you can't do anything about it. I was told rears wear faster than fronts even though my girlfriend drives it like a granny. Two sets of rears to one set of fronts, it what i was told.

I was partners in an alignment/brake shop several
years ago and did very well. Anyway my opinion
is if your balance, alignment and tire pressure are
correct you won't have uneven tire wear. Cupping
is caused by an out of balance problem that's easy
to fix unless you let it go to long. If you know what
to look for you can run you hand along the tread
and tell what's going on with your tires. You
shouldn't feel highs and lows just a smooth flat
surface. And on a good flat road you shouldn't
feel any vibration in the stearing wheel plus you
can take your hands off the wheel and the car will
track straight.

My car does track straight, and I don't believe it's a camber issue - my old car was lowered and had much more camber than the G has stock, yet no such noises. I forgot the terms for the other alignment adjustments - toe and caster? but anyways, I haven't ever hit anything that would throw my alignment off. Could this really be normal - or shall we say, a design flaw?

And I was thinking about BFGs for the front, but I did notice the BFGs weren't quite as grippy as the RE050s. Plus, BFGs don't come in 225/40R19, and I'd like to have stock fitment. My next set of tires may be PS2s on the front, as they're somewhere in between the BFGs (280AA) and the RE050s (140AA). The BFGs do look cool, though

Ok, my PS2's are on and they are incredible. Grippy, quiet, and everything I could've hoped for out of $500 worth of tire, costing me $1200. Anyway, quite nice. I'll follow up after a few thousand miles but the real test will be how they sound after about 6k miles. That's where the REO50A's started getting noticeably noisy.

I have run into this same exact issue and was told the same. The car runs a straight line without touching the steering wheel and there is no vibration in the wheel at all. I ran my hand on both tires and they felt fine. The real question is if it happens with different rubber on the fronts? Interested to see what the result is from above.

I get tire noise from michelins ps2`s. I replaced them with new ones and 20k later same thing. Is there anything that can be done about this?