Project Tundra: 5000 Mile Evaluation of Nitto’s New Ridge Grappler Tires!

Project Tundra: 5000 Mile Evaluation of Nitto's New Ridge Grappler Tires!

by Mike Kojima

We were very pleased with the Nitto Terra Grappler tires that Project Tundra had been running for the last 7 years. We had over 60,000 miles of towing, supercharged burnouts, daily driving and off-roading on them including a day of driving hard around Willow Springs Raceway. We were very pleased to note that they still had at least 70% of their original tread and still worked quite well!

In fact, our tires were just starting to get a little cracked from age at the bottom of the tread blocks, and we were thinking that they would get hard before they were worn out. Amazingly, we were 100% confident that these tires would last well over 100,000 miles on the truck. Even though our tires still probably had a few more YEARS left on them, we got a call from Nitto and they wanted us to evaluate their brand new Ridge Grappler truck tire, and we gladly obliged them!

Looking at the Ridge Grappler, we were a little worried about on-road performance in dry handling on pavement and road noise, but Nitto assured us that we would not be disappointed in those areas, even though the Ridge Grappler had a look that to us seemed more off-road biased.

The first point Nitto drove home with us is that the tire was designed first to be quiet, even though by looking at the tread, that is counter-intuitive. The tread has a variable pitch around the circumference of the tire to prevent harmonics from making the off-road tire humming noise that we find so irritating. The groove placement in the tread blocks was also designed to help cancel noise. 

The shoulder grooves were designed to help the tire to shed mud and to provide many biting edges, critical for off-road grip. The bottoms of the shoulder grooves have reinforcing buttresses to help keep the grooves open to help off-road grip and to reduce tread squirm during hard road driving. 

The grooves also have alternating tapered and stepped edges to give secondary biting surfaces just below the face of the block and the primary block edge. These really make a difference as the block edges get rounded with wear and on softer surfaces.  

We usually don't go hardcore off-roading in Project Tundra, but we recently made a shooting trip where we had to repeatedly cross a sand filled wash and we found that the Ridge Grappler has surprisingly good grip in loose sand, even though they are not a sand optimized design. Other trucks that were with us struggled in the sand, and rocks and we didn't even need to get out of 2WD. 

The Ridge Grappler has two different sidewalls on either side of the tire; one looks more aggressive than the other. The side shown in these pictures happens to be the less aggressive side. We had asked the tire shop to leave the more aggressive side out to look badass but they messed up. The less aggressive side still looks pretty tough.