Tirefolio Find my fitment

Carlisle tire failures: owner complaint analysis

What owners told NHTSA about Carlisle tires; 88 written complaints across 1 line, classified by failure mode and compared with the whole tire-complaint corpus.

By Mark Bishop · Last verified 2026-10-07

Carlisle lines with enough reports to analyze

A line appears here once at least 30 owners have filed a written account of a failure. "Relative" compares the most-described problem on that line with how often it appears across all tire complaints.

LineWritten reportsMost describedRelative
Radial Trail 88 Blowout or sudden deflation 2.9×

Across every carlisle tire

What owners described

Blowout or sudden deflation appears in 61% of these reports; about 3.0× as often as across all tire complaints. Percentages are shares of the 321 reports filed against Carlisle tires across every line and vehicle that include a written account; a single report can describe more than one problem, so they do not total 100%.

Reported problemThis subjectAll tire complaintsRelative
Blowout or sudden deflation 61% 20% 3.0×
Tread or belt separation 19% 13% 1.4×
Sidewall failure 17% 15% 1.1×
Bubble or bulge in the tire 12% 6% 2.1×
Cracking or dry rot 5% 9% 0.5×
Loss of control, rollover or collision 3% 8% 0.4×

Mileage at failure

124 of these reports state an odometer reading. The middle report is at 3,000 miles, with 8 in 10 falling between 1,000 and 7,500 miles.

How to read this

Complaints are voluntarily submitted to the NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation and are not verified by NHTSA. They are owner-reported problems, not proven defects, and volume tracks how many of a tire were sold as much as how often it failed. What is comparable is the mix: which problems owners describe here versus across every tire complaint on file. That comparison, the mileage distribution and the mode rankings on this page are our analysis of the public record.

Sources

Last verified 2026-10-07 against the sources below.

  1. NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation; owner complaints dataset (unverified owner reports, US federal government work, public domain).
  2. NHTSA Recalls database, nhtsa.gov/recalls.
  3. Corpus baselines computed over 58,390 complaint narratives longer than 200 characters.