Is it ok to mis-match the front and rear tires?

I have done a search and found some people say yes, some say no. However, in most of the results I found people were talking about going from S02s to S03s or similar.

My situation, however, is from Mich. Pilot Sport A/S (all-season) to S03s. My car was bought used with a full set of Pilot Sport A/S (of course the rear tires were the incorrect size ) and the rear tires are almost completely gone while the fronts have quite a bit of tread left. I would really like to replace the rears with S03s and keep the P.S. A/Ss in the front if possible.

So i'm not sure if having the all-seasons in the front and the S03s in the back is a bad idea.

Any thoughts?

 

simply put, it is a bad idea.

 

You want to have four matching tires.

 

It's generally a bad idea if you don't understand how it affects the handling of the car. Any car has particular characteristics with any given tire. Even with stock tires, our cars have a tendency to oversteer at the limit. Most owners know this and deal with it. If you mismatch tires front to rear, these characteristics change. Only if you don't know how they change and know how to deal with it, does it become dangerous.
I'm not going to tell you to do or not do this or that. Once upon a time, people used to put only snow tires on the rear of RWD cars. This became dangerous when those people didn't understand what it does to the car's handling. Those who did understand and drove accordingly never had a problem. Today, tire shops will always recommend having snow tires on all four corners because they can't leave to chance the distinct possibility that any given owner will NOT have that understanding and NOT drive the car accordingly. I guess the same goes for all other kinds of tires.

 

Understood. Thanks for the info guys.

On a side note, I just checked tirerack for 245/45/16 S03s and they dont seem to exist anymore? Does bridgestone make any max performance summer tires in that size or is the Potenza RE750 their best option now?

 

I do have the S03 in the 245/45R16 in stock. Just give me a call.