Big, chunky, off-road-ready tires have become quite fashionable among truck enthusiasts. The nature of gearing, though, means that owners who choose to increase the size of their tires may have to suffer some consequences.
The Fast Lane Truck wanted to find out just how much a set of bigger tires would affect the performance of a 2021 Ford F-150 Hybrid. Noted for its fuel efficiency, the question of whether or not the electric motors would help it deal with bigger tires is an interesting one to consider.
The team, therefore, mounted a set of 34-inch (86 cm) off-road tires onto the stock wheels and fitted them to the truck. Those were about two inches (5 cm) larger than the stock tires, but, in addition to the tires, the truck was also lifted by two inches.
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It was then run on a 63 mile (101 km) driving loop to see how much gas it consumed in city and highway driving. A similar (albeit marginally shorter) loop along the same roads was run previously in the truck with its stock tires and suspension. Without modifications, it returned 22.5 miles per gallon (10.4 lt/100 km).
And with them, it performed remarkably well in the second test. Although this isn’t quite a scientific study, in this video the truck achieved 22.0 MPG (10.6 lt/100 km). That’s a small enough difference that it could be considered insignificant.
There is evidence, however, that the larger tires affected performance. In an acceleration test with the modifications, it hit 60 mph (96 km/h) in 6.1 seconds, which is 0.5 seconds slower than it managed without the modifications.
That shows that the tires size do affect the performance of the truck and may be behind the lost fuel efficiency. The differences are quite small, though, and may be aided by the electric motor, which offers plenty of torque instantly, and may be helping to overcome some of the effective gearing disadvantage that larger diameter wheels naturally cause.
Ultimately, the video proves, though, that an F-150 Hybrid is perfectly capable of being lightly modified without causing a driver much pain at the pump.