Given
61%
while driving a
Kia Motors Sportage
(225/60 R17) on
a combination of roads
for 4,609
average miles
These tires performed reasonably well in all categories but are very poor value indeed due to short tire lifetime.
All tires I have ever purchased have had a tread depth of 7mm or more when new - to my surprise the Continental EcoContact 6 tires, fitted to a brand new car I recently hired, only had a tread depth of 6.3mm. The GoodYear Efficiency tires on my previous newly hired car had a tread depth of 7.5mm. I checked with the supplier that the Continental tires were new, which they confirmed. So I phoned Continental UK and spoke to one of their technical staff who, to my surprise, confirmed that the manufactured tread depth was indeed 6.3mm, within some 1/10th mm tolerance. The continental advertising blurb claimed that their superior technology made the tires more wear resistant, so I decided to wait, measure, and check that is true. It isn't.
The front Continental EcoContact 6 tires on my fwd drive car have done only 4609 miles in their first year (Covid limited mileage) and their measured tread depth is now 5.3mm, a loss in tread depth of 1.0mm which projects to 2.2mm tread depth reduction per 10k miles.
The equivalent figure for my previous car tires (Toyota Avensis estate with GoodYear Efficiency 215/55/R17) was a bit better than that, at 1.9mm/10kmiles, challenging Continental's claim of extra wear resistance.
And because Continental EcoContact 6 tires are manufactured with only 6.3mm tread, 1.2mm less than GoodYear, I get about 5.5k miles less 'life' from them than from the GoodYear tires; the missing 1.2mm would have extended the tire's 'lifetime' by 4609 miles x 1.2mm/1.0mm = 5.5k miles.