re: "Keep your better tires on the rear wheels"

It's the global warming of the auto industry.

I honestly came in here believing you should always put fresh tires on the front since that's what rotating does. But after reading the sources Clames posted (very good info) the purpose of rotation is to even tire wear since you will get more wear on front tires. The small discrepancy in tread depth does little to affect traction unless the intervals have been uneven.

And Clames's articles also changed my mind when seeing this:

Bad tires in front -> understeer (which is easy to correct)

Bad tires in rear -> oversteer (which is more difficult to correct and can lead to spinning out)

Thanks Clames for bringing in esteemed sources to empirically prove me wrong. I came in wanting to downvote everyone who said bad tires on front but was surprised to see the data disagreed with me.

"Best tire, where" should never be a question. If a tire is suspect, change it.

I do a 5-tire Rotation on my Jeep. I'll never just buy 2. I'll buy 4 at once and the next rotation buy another.

From Top Gear, “understeer works like this, you drive down the road, you turn the wheel but the car goes straight on, crashes into a tree, and you die. Over steer works like this, you drive down the same bit of road, turn the wheel, but the back of the car comes around like this, and you go off the road, crash into a tree and you die. Now, oversteer is best because you don’t see the tree that kills you!”