New Treads

New Tires We Saw at the 2016 Sema Show.

- Verne Simons

WE LOVE ALL TIRES AND WE CANNOT LIE. You other brothers (or sisters) can’t deny. Light-duty truck tires, agricultural tires with head-sized tread voids, new or old, big and bigger, knobby and knobbier, clean or dirty, worn or with the fuzzy hairs still intact—we don’t care. We love all tires. We even like really old tires with nostalgic treads, assuming they are still safe to use on-road or off. We love the smell of new tires so much that we think we will look into making a tire-scented cologne for men—except maybe our women wouldn’t understand or like that.

The annual SEMA show in Las Vegas is a great place to spend time looking at new and different tire treads. And while we wish you could be here, we know not all of you can. Even those of you who went might not have had a chance to see everything we did. To this end, we have assembled images and some info on all of the new off-road tires we bumped into at the show. Not all of the tire designs are truly new, and some are blatant copies of tires we know and like, but most, if not all, are new to us—or at the least available in a new size. We also tossed in a few new cool tire-based ideas that we saw along the way. We hope to be able to test some of these new treads, and we are going to skip the gnarly ag tires and stick to light-truck mud-terrain tires for now, but we will give you our impressions based on looks and years of experience and some of the details on what these tires are.