I've never heard of this darkside ideology before. This is really interesting! Now, as per rules, I want to make clear that I'm not trying to open up a pros and cons can of worms, but I am just really interested in learning exactly why someone would run car tires on their motorcycle. A little contradictory, I suppose, but please enlighten me!

 

In no particular order...

Less expensive
Better mileage
Better wet traction
Better dry traction
Better braking effectiveness
Better stability on highway next to 18-wheelers
Better stability on questionable terrain such as gravel roads

It is worth the look and investigation to see if it is right for you. Goldwingers have been doing this for many years. Only us HD guys seem to be afraid of it ironically.

 

Wow, that's crazy. I never would've thought that they would give better traction versus purpose-built motorcycle tires. I'm definitely going to have to do more looking-into on this. Thank you!

 

Do your research and make the decision that you are comfortable with. There are lots of good threads here and across the internet as a whole. Learn everything you can.

Those of us here that are doing it will certainly tell you our experiences.

TooEasy has a great writeup that you can search on as well as others. anything that is not in this section of the forum have many of the naysayers that are not allowed in here. 99.9% of them have never tried a car tire but will be quick to point out how wrong it is or that their mother's sister's husbands 2nd cousin on his fathers side is an engineer for NASA and that person says that car tires are bad. Look past all of that and focus on the facts presented by those actually doing it.

 

Notice better handling isn't listed above.

 

Those that have run car tires actually do say they handle better including folks that have run The Dragon. I don't know that I or anyone else can say that they handle "better" but they are very comparable by everything I'ver read.

I will say this. I cannot tell a difference between this tire and my OEM Dunlop while riding.

 

This is news to me also. Good info..

 

I'm the type of guy who will drag my footpegs at any given opportunity. Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely not discounting anything you're saying, but I personally don't see how a car tire at a great lean angle won't be riding dangerously on the sidewall since most aren't rounded, right? There must be certain types of car tires that are vastly better than others for this purpose, no? I guess what I'm talking about here would be sidewall collapse, and potentially running out of contact patch on a lean.

 

You would be amazed. The tire is not at maximun pressure therefore has some flex in it so it is not stiff like a typical motorcycle tire. There continues to ba alot of contact patch from peg scrape to peg scrape. Folks have ridden the Dragon and absolutely loved the way it handled that stretch of road.

 

I never dragged the boards but did scrape my slick shifter linkage last weekend on the Dragon. This pic should show the wear on the SP 5000 on the back of my Ultra.