Know your tires.
An argument of discussion as eye-catching as someone trying to convince you to drink more water, but they are right, often boring things are the most important.
I have now more than 60’000 km on my BF Goodrich General Grabber, and although they have the sides that are used because I went off-road a lot; the thread is less used that a lot of vehicles I saw on the road with half the kilometres.
One vehicle is not what is going to dictate the science behind tire pressure, and the goal here is not to tell you what to do or not to do, the goal is to suggest to you to experiment with the tires pressure of your vehicle to find the perfect setup for your vehicle. Do you think that with all the defects on our vehicles that came from lack of thought and will to spend time to find the perfect solution, they sent the vehicle with the perfect tire pressure to your specific needs, vehicle load, terrain you are driving on etc?
Deflate.
Seriously deflate those tires, changing a set of tires costs 800 euros, let’s even say it’s 1200, it dosen’t matter, the annoying rattling of the furniture of your van, costs more to the lifespan of the interior of your vehicle and to your smile, but let’s face it those noises are really annoying.
You can buy 6000 euros suspensions but if you don’t know how to setup your tires properly it isn’t going to change much because your tires are the first absorbers of imperfection in the road, and they transmit that to the shock absorbers.
Even Elon Musk, at the release of the Model 3 suggested people should decrease the tire pressure of that vehicle because the decrease in MPG (or MP kw in this case) was really worth the increase in comfort.
My tire pressure range.
By no means this is something to follow in the letter, I’m no tire expert, it’s just my personal experience over 60K kilometers on very different terrains: desert; gravel; snow; autobahn: mountain roads, and so on.
Road 50-55 PSI
Gravel 35-40 PSI
Sand 25 PSI: be careful going lower, if your tire spins too fast when heavily deflated, the tire can detach from the lip of the rim, and there’s no way you are going to solve this problem in the middle of the desert. So be extra careful on low pressures, you can go really low in case of need, but monitor that well, inflate the tire ASAP at least back to 25-30 PSI.