Tire rotation - Front Wheel Drive Vehicle
Est. Time: 1hr
In this How-To I’m going to show you how to rotate tires on my 2006 Jetta.
To achieve maximum tire life, the best practice is to rotate them on a seasonal basis. I have a front wheel drive car with uni-directional tires so I’ll be rotating fronts to back and back to fronts. If you’ve had a wheel alignment recently chances are your front tires will be more worn than rears with a FWD.
I’m running Kumho tires and they seam to be wearing well but I did place my tire depth gauge and sure enough the difference is sizeable.
- Front Tires = roughly 8/32”
- Rear Tires = 10/32”
Tools Required:
- 17mm socket
- Breaker bar
- Torque wrench
- Impact wrench 1/2” (optional)
- Jack
- Spare tire (optional)
Step 1:
Jack up the car and remove the tire
You may need a breaker bar to loosen the lug bolts.
Important to note! When using a breaker bar, be sure to just break the seal on each lug if the car isn’t jacked up or else you can risk damaging your wheel lug bolts
The best strategy I found was to jack up one side at a time and temporarily install your spare tire if you have one.
Step 2:
Replace front tires with rear tires.
Repeat on other side
Step 3:
Torque your tires by following the star pattern
The factory specification is
- 89ft/lbs
Step 4:
Be sure you are running the correct air pressure, the door panel says 33psi but I’m going to run 29
My tires are especially low due to the cold weather
Job done!
Drop a comment and lemme know how your tire rotation went 👍