The Bridgestone low-pro 24.5s on owner-operator John McCormick's 2021 Kenworth W900L are getting fairly close to the mileage where he'd typically replace them with virgin rubber in all positions. He's about 30,000 miles or so shy of the 250K mark with them. "I’m going to need them pretty soon," he said. "I was kind of wanting to have a set on there before the snow flies, but I never did get it done."
He still has "plenty meat on the tires" he's got, in any case, yet early inquiries with the service folks at a truck stop along his routes in North Central Kentucky delivered a notion this past week that surprised him.
"They said they can’t get any 24.5s," said McCormick. "Their tire dealers were telling them they would cease production on it, and said there wasn’t any demand for it."
Yet: How could that possibly be, he asked himself, given, for instance, the entire fleet of thousands of pneumatic trailers owned by his leasing fleet, Oakley Trucking, seemed to be outfitted with tall 24.5s? That's to say nothing of his own and countless other owner-operators' low-pro 24.5s.
McCormick's not the only one having 24.5 tire sourcing issues. A whopping 43% of all respondents to Overdrive's recent parts-sourcing survey reported difficulty sourcing tires at some point over the past three years, generally. More particularly, Gary Wasko of the G.L. Wasko & Sons small fleet, based in Michigan, has struggled with it for two years, he said, to the point that he bought as many replacement 24.5s as he could, well ahead of the needed replacements. The 12-truck fleet, like McCormick, runs low-pro 24.5 tires on all of its tractors, and at one point Wasko "had 10 new steer tires and I had two sets of drives here" stored in the shop and at the ready, he said. "We’re a small company, so that’s unusual, but it was what I felt like we had to do to be able to get through this hump."
Owner-operator McCormick spoke to a manager in his fleet's shop who noted a move to recaps in some measure for the company's trailers -- out of mere necessity with lack of availability. And ultimately, that's been the issue -- availability, not a move to totally phase out the 24.5 size, according to numerous tire makers.
A Yokohama rep, answering a query about a rumored phase-out of the size, noted simply, "We are continuing production on the 24.5 and have supply."
