Thread: one more tire question.

Have had three sets of Cooper ST's (and one each of HT's, AT's and ATR's) and found them to be very good for the type of driving I do. That is day to day bitumen driving and outback touring with a bit of bush work thrown in. Whilst not a muddy nor a tame AT I'd describe them as an 'agressive' AT. Not as quiet on bitumen as Coopers ATR they also don't howl like muddies and frighten you to death in the wet.
The only downside I've found is that the ST's tend chip on on the outer tread blocks when driven on the sharp flinty type of road you can find in the outback. Definitely wouldn't recommend them for rock climbing over sharp rocks. Also if your driving style is a bit on the leadfoot side and you tend to power you're way through obstacles I reckon this would do the same damage.
I believe this is why Cooper developed the STT with a softer compound to resist chipping.
Only had two flats in over 250,000 Km on ST's. One was a razor sharp rock sliver in the valley between the tread blocks in the exact centre of the tyre. I was towing a caravan at the time so had higher than 'normal' off road tyre pressures at the time which were contributing factors. The other was a pinched tyre against the rim at 25psi and 25 Km/h on the rock strewn track between Mt. Dare and Dalhousie Springs (should have taken the Blood Creek road) which was just bad luck.
So I can recommend ST's as a good general purpose tyre, with the above limitations.

Deano

My two cents, I'll go for the BFG's

Tallied up my log books recently and my last sidewall punture was over 700,000 km ago on a very worn AT on the Skeleton Coast. In fact haven't had a puncture in the last 4 years and I build roads for a living, so my tyres gets worked hard on natural bush land, mud, crushed gravels and the rest. My current set is 265/75/16 KM2's and they are no louder on blacktop than BFG AT's in the same size.

No product bashing intented, but our vehicles on Barrow Island all had AT's from Mickey Thomson, Cooper and BFG with only the BFG's not starting to lose big lugs of rubber after 20,000km.

In the end its your choice, but don't get sucked in by advertising claiming feats beyond the ability of the vehicle and not mentioning the support vehicles with complete sets of spare tyres following sponsored convoys.