My '07s owners manual says not to swap tires front to rear or reverse. Why ?
Have any of you rotated tires for better wear/mileage ?

 

Must be some wierd thing w/ the GenII cars but I rotate my tyres every 5000 mile on my 04 GenI

 

You can rotate front and rear on the same side.
But not from left to right hand sides ,because the tyers can only rotate in one direction.

 

Rotating will extend the life of your tires. Why MINI doesn't recommend it is beyond me. Not all MINI OEM tires are unidirectional (rotate in only one direction), but it is easy to just rotate them front to back. There are lots of posts on this topic, but one thing that does come up is that beyond a certain point you can't rotate them any more. I rotate mine about every 3,500 miles. If one pair gets much more worn down than the other, you won't be able to rotate effectively.

 

The best tires should always be mounted in the back. In a FWD car, the fronts always wear faster than the rears so the moment you rotate them, you've made the car less safe.

Just wait til the fronts wear out to the wear bars and then buy 2 new tires. Move the still-good rears to the front and install the two new ones at the rear. Assuming the alignment and balance are OK, you'll get the same amount of wear out of a set of tires using this method.

btw, because of the safety issue, some tire stores now require that when only two new tires are purchased, they must be installed at the rear.

 

MINI now recommends rotating the tires every 3000-4000 miles in the 2007 manual

 

I have a 02 MC and rotate tires every 4500 miles or earlier. It seems to extend the tire life for my MINI at least.

 

If you rotate them every 3 to 5K miles (depending on how soft the tire/how hard you drive) the difference in tread depth won't be a real factor . . . and the even wear will be a positive safety factor for the life of the 4 tire set. Make the second rotation after 2 k and each time you rotate you'll make the car a little safer according to the theory above. In reality by having more tread on the rear tires than the front you are opting to have understeer when driving too fast in wet conditions. In my opinion the car already has too much understeer in the stock setup.

There are many, many more realistic things to do to make driving safer. Oh, if you are talking about two new tires and two tires down to 2/32nds, then maybe there is a point to not putting the old tires on the rear. I think this is the situation the tire shops avoid. By rotating the tires regularly this is just the situation you will avoid. The choice of having to choose oversteer rather than understeer does then not have to be made.