A statistician would not put any value on tire failure reports between this year and the last based on posts on this forum. There's too many factors that could skew the results. As mentioned, it could be because some forum members are taking better care of their tires after reading reports here. Or it could be because after reading tire reports on the forum, they just accept what happens to them. I highly doubt it's because owners are upgrading to LT tires.
Besides, for every person that goes to an RV forum, there's thousand or tens of thousands of RV owners out there that never use forums so there's no accurate data for failures in the general RV population.
It seems to me that a lot more failures are due more to "operator error" and other factors as opposed to where they are made. I have found Roger Marble's (a former tire engineer)
RVtiresafety.com blog to have excellent info. With ST tires, it appears to be very important to keep speed down below 65, to maintain correct pressure all around, to not overload tires and to regularly inspect the tires.
There's other factors that can lead to failure or premature wear such as alignment issues, loose wheel bearings, weak frames/suspensions and worn bushings.
I now follow all the precautionary measures including a TPMS. We now have over 1,000 miles on our Marathon LRD tires in the first year of our latest TT, so we must be doing something right, lol...
