Here's article from
Road & Track - The greatest automotive advancement in history, and its heretics.
First, I completely agree with article about lower
R&D and quality-control with motorcycle tyres compared to auto tyres. Well, consequences of tyre-failure on +4000-lb vehicle carrying family of 5 can be seriously severe. Compared to a dirty-hippie on 400-lb bike? Not even close.
Personally I've had more problems with motorcycle than auto tyres, especially bad considering I've got easily 10x more mileage on autos. My track 250 originally came with Dunlop GPR300 tyres, which seems to be similar to the Q2s I had on my CBR600RR. After my first day @ track for NRS class, I noticed centre tread tearing and chunking. Dunlop tyre-booth guy said, "
must be cold-tears from too much braking too soon, heat it up on warmers first." and gave me discount on set of Alpha-13s. Hmmm... OK... Some
BARFers recently reported similar street-riding tyre damage similar to me. I don't think heating up street-tyres with warmers should be required procedure just to go riding.
My buddy Jason who used to race TZ250s with AMA now does trackdays with me on his Aprilia RSV4 Factory and swears by Pirelli tyres. He wrote off Dunlops after having similar QC issues with them on his TZ. Well, couple months ago, he TOO had problems with his Pirelli tyre shredding under normal conditions. Pirelli refused to acknowledge any fault. Well, when you're paying $250 per tyre that lasts just one day, it had better last that entire day darn it!!!
Most of these Darksiders have had motorcycle tyres overheat and even blow-up under normal touring-bike usage! Many of them had multiple failures before going to auto tyres. So from their experience, they've improved their safety as they've had no more failures since switching to auto tyre under similar conditions. Can't argue against that data.
Here's some videos of bikes cornering with auto tyres:
Link to original page on YouTube.
Link to original page on YouTube.
Under normal use, bike's tyre has lenticular contact shape, longitudinally oriented like leaf. An auto-tyre has oval contact-patch aimed laterally. In upright usage, bike's load is concentrated on narrow-band in centre of motorcycle-tire; that's why we get commuter stripe in middle. With auto-tyre, that load is spread out across entire width of tyre, so much less stress per unit area.
When leaning under cornering, auto-tyre's contact patch changes from wide oval into longitudinal one just like motorcycle tyre! The load-direction on casing is similar to motorcycle-tyre, not an auto-tyre. Autos push on their tyres from outside-in when cornering. This bunches up contact-patch and distorts it. That's why wider rims on autos help improve cornering by stretching tyre and leading to less contact-patch distortion when cornering. However, on motorcycle, that tyre casing is stretched under tension from middle to outside. There is no distortion of contact-patch and casing-load is distributed across tread and outer sidewall very evenly. An auto-tyre is stressed lot less on motorcycle than on a car.
All this fear-mongering is misplaced and illogical. It's armchair-rationalization, not from personal-experience, or even 2nd-hand from someone else you know who've done it. So it sounds a lot like "Don't go to edge of Earth, you'll fall off and die for sure!!!".