I knew I needed new tires for the Saturn the day I bought it. The sun rot was noticeable on the side walls and when the front tires were turned so I could inspect them really well, I got a look at all the cracks between the treads. Definitely time to replace, and I’d driven them nearly 800 miles by that time. As soon as I had a free moment, did some internet research looking for a set of tires. This L200 model uses 15″ tires and I just enter the size, 195/70 R15 into Google and up pops a bunch of different brand of tires and tire shops in my area. I was still in Pahrump at the time and saw that Walmart carried the Arroyo tire brand. I’d sort of settled on that brand basically because of the price. They were beating all the other manufacturers by like $100 for a set. As usual I did an online investigation of them and they sounded like good tires. I did the online ordering through Walmart. And a couple days later, my order just disappeared from my Walmart page without notice or explanation, the day they were supposed to be delivered to their shop. WTF? What I guessed was that Walmart just discontinued or ran out of that tire but their system isn’t sophisticated enough to inform buyers who have standing orders, just erasing them instead.
Well, anyway, found them somewhere else online (same price) and ordered them to be delivered here at the RV park. Then went around to several tire stores and asked if they’d install tires I brought in myself. Most said yes, so I had a lot of choices. Then the day after I received the tires, I was driving around with them in the back seat and happened on a shop off the main roads I’d not noticed before. Stopped in and got a quote for $60 Balanced and Mounted. Saved $40 over the next nearest quote. Cool. Had them do the job right then and the tech showed me how bad the old ones were inside and between the treads. Close to a blow out, all four of them. I got lucky.
The tires and installation cost came to $234, so $58.50/tire balanced and mounted, and I’m happy with that. Here the car is at the shop door.
And a few shots of the undercarriage for future reference. Brake pads were in the 75% range.
Looking at the undercarriage without the tires/wheels makes me feel like I got lucky with this purchase after the low mileage Saturn’s I’d seen pictures of that were over in the mid west and great lakes area. Most of those the undercarriage looked 10X worse then this one. This particular car spent it’s life with the first owner near the seashore in Oceanside, California. By the looks of it, it stayed in a garage or other protected area, not right next to salt water, or in salt laden air from the sea. But the sun rot on the tires exhibited suggests it was getting lots of sunshine. They only put 66,000 miles on it before I bought it and the tires could have been original I suppose. But not likely. After 18 years? No, I’d suspect this was the 2nd set of tires this car had. Now it’s running on it’s 3rd set.
And here are the old tires. They don’t look too bad until you get close up and notice the cracks between the treads…in the groves. I could actually see the nylon filaments.
And here it is all ready to go after the shop finished with it. Note the plastic hub cap? It has a large chunk broken out of it and a few days after getting the new tires I pulled all these hub caps off and tossed them. Couldn’t stand to look at it the broken one any more. Then I bought some black lug nuts and soon I’ll scrub the wheels and maybe spray paint them black so they look nice, then install the new nuts. I’ve gone round and round with plastic hub caps breaking or just falling off on my other cars over the years and I don’t want to play that game again. There was a time years ago when a USED plastic hub cap cost me $25 for ONE. It matched the others on the car though and I was preparing to sell it so basically had to have it. Nowadays, a set of four plastic hubcaps is around $26 so not as bad, and if I feel like it, I’ll go that route someday. Not soon though. These were special in that the fake plastic lug nuts are threaded and screw onto the actual (and special) lug nuts holding it on the wheel. That’s special as most plastic hub caps don’t feature that, ordinarily they just snap onto the wheel and what look like lug nuts are fake. Those are held on the wheel with friction.
That screw on plastic lug nut was a good idea to keep the hubcap on, but obviously, that doesn’t protect them from breakage as seen in the above picture, so off they came. I kinda think that it makes the car look less like a theft item without hubcaps anyway. Potential thieves would look at it and likely decide it’s not taken care of.
Anywho, I now have a nice set of tires on the car good for 50,000 miles according to their spec sheet. I expect to keep it for 10 years and at 5,000 per year average, I might have the opportunity to see if that comes true. Usually though, I find the OEM tire mileage rating to be a tad optimistic…or a lie. Time will tell.
So now I have a nice attractive car with brand new tires without any fancy hubcaps.