I wouldn't worry about Chen Shin motorcycle tires, they have been around since I was in college (I unloaded them by the truck load when I worked for Honda of Raleigh as my college summer job and that was back in the 70s).
Chen Shin started out by religiously copying the best designs by Dunlop and Metzler and they did a fairly good job of it. With shipping from the orient the tires landed in the US at about 50% of what the big boys cost. You might not like handling and they didn't last as long but they never self-destructed.
If Chen Shin bike tires
ever had a self destruct issue nobody has heard about it in 40 years of selling bike tires.
Gort is talking about small start up car tire makers in China that are "leaving out components" in cheap tires that do meet all the local requirements for safety, etc. for where they were made (not a lot of tire safety rules in China or Indo-China for that matter).
What has US tire makers, the United Steel Workers Union and various US politicians madder 'n hell is whole cargo carrier loads of these sub-standard construction tires are moving through low rent American importers into the very bottom end of US distribution chain WEARING FAKED DOT APPROVAL STAMPS at prices a US tire maker can't even buy the base crude rubber for. This constitutes dumping in US law.
Somebody is getting greased, somebody is subsidizing the mgfs and certainly several somebody's are breaking the law bringing in these tires with faked DOT clearances.
Just so you will know, DOT high speed high temp testing got more severe this past year (147 degrees ambient at 140 mph at full rated load).
Tires that did test to old DOT standards won't pass these new tests. Japanese and Indo China standards are not nearly this severe, so there are lots of room for a start-up in China to "get all confused" about that new DOT rating.
Now, tires that were good enough 2 years ago not being good enough now -- does that make these tires unsafe?
Were they unsafe 2 years ago?
And let me tell you, there is one US mgf who shall remain nameless that had to upgrade 30% of all existing tire designs to get them to pass the new DOT high speed tests.
Does that mean that tires in inventory from 2 years ago are unsafe? I know that that mfg put in a system to purge all inventory within a 3 year period (they scrapped them) to make sure no old tires survived -- but do you think the Chinese did?
Hell no, they dumped them before any deadlines approached. They shipped them to some unscrupulous US importer's head buyer who wanted something to run in the paper on Thanksgiving weekend Black Friday sale.
Greed and money --
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