Robot’s Useless Reviews – Tires

OK. Straight out of the gate, I’m not sure why we call tires, ‘tires.’ Is it because they make you tired? If you think this is tiring, your tires might say, just imagine riding on the bare rims.

The internet suggests that maybe ‘tire’ is a shortening of ‘attire,’ because the iron band that formed the outer part of a carriage wheel was thought to “attire the wheel.” FML, English is a weird amalgam of abstract thoughts and anachronisms. Maybe that’s why I love it.

I’ll go out on a limb and say I think tires should be called ‘rubbers.’ “What rubbers you got on?” you might say to a friend. That makes a lot more sense than “How have you chosen to attire your wheels today?” right? And ok, yes, obviously ‘rubbers’ has connotational overlap with a slang term for condoms, which gives me a small chuckle, but it’s just a lot more accurate. They used to call galoshes, ‘rubbers,’ so I’m obviously not the first idiot to plow this linguistic furrow.

Enough about the word though. Let’s get to the thing itself.

What I know about tires is you want them to be very smooth, because those roll faster, and you want them wide unless you want them skinny. Also, bumps are good to put on there, because bumps are good for traction. The size of the bumps matters, like with skin diseases. There are highly specialized people who arrange and rearrange the tread patterns of tires in subtle ways to achieve mystical ends. I appreciate what they do without all the way trusting them.

Tire tread patterns are like those stereogram posters to me. I don’t see what other people see.

Another thing I know about tires is that it’s maybe best not to know too much about the ones you have, because a certain type of person will ask you WAY too many questions about them, so many questions that you might begin to feel bad that you don’t know all that stuff but really, in the end, you just end up annoyed, because why are we talking about this? Ideally, you want to buy your tires from a person like that, but take your credit card out real early in the conversation so as to signal, physically, that you’d greatly prefer just to pay and leave with whatever stereogram nonsense they’ve prescribed you.

In Britain, they say ‘tyre.’ Do you hear the difference?

For all this, I believe the tire is tragically underrated and churlishly taken for granted. The pneumatic tire is the OG suspension. We spend a lot of money on pieces of elaborately molded carbon fiber, but we’re not going anywhere without our properly inflated rubbers. There’s an argument to be made that the tires are actually the most important components on the bicycle.

This does not mean, paradoxically, that I want to talk about yours ad nauseum while we pedal along together. Frankly, I’d rather discuss French onion dip, of which I am an enormous fan and supporter. The amazing thing about French onion dip is that very fancy ones are delicious, but also the big, honking tub of Helluva Good French Onion Dip you get at whatever multinational grocery chain you shop in is also surpassingly delightful. It occurs to me now that I’ve lost my train of thought though…

The bottom line is that you should definitely put tires on your bike if you don’t have a pair on there already. I’m not going to hassle you about what kind. I’d wager you could ride most surfaces with most tires, just with mixed results, and what is life anyway by a vast sea of mixed results?