[VGM6]

Hello all,

So yesterday I ran into a fellow X6M owner who was parked next to me with a beautiful set of HRE S201's in 22". Now what I found odd at first glance was his tires were pretty thick so I was confused as to what size he was running. Took a glance and saw that in the fronts he is running 285/40/22 and rears were 325/35/22. The stock tire size for 20" are 285/40/20 front and 325/35/20 rears, and for 21" 285/35/21 front and 325/30/21 rears if I'm not mistaken (I have 20's so i could be wrong on the 21's).

When the owner came back to his car I asked him if he ever ran into any issues using larger tires then recommended as I would assume for 22"s you would need to run 285/30/22 front and 325/25/22. He stated that in the rears he has no issues obviously because they aren't used for turning. But that in the fronts he had rubbing issues on the inside of the wheel while turning but used spacers (I should've asked what size but looked like 5-10mm). His english was broken and I didn't want to take any more of his time but I never had a chance to ask him if his speedo might show that his speed is showing different then his actual speed since in theory if you run larger tires i would assume your speedo would read for example 55mph while your actual speed could be around 60mph or higher. Also if it would affect your cruise control functioning properly. In my M6 i switched to 295/30/19 instead of the stock 285/35/19 for the rear but kept the stock fronts at 245/40/19 which had issues initializing the cruise control as the rears were rotating at a different rate in the rear so once I wore out the tires i returned back to stock sizing in the rears and the issue was resolved.

Having thicker tires would be great with a larger rim since the 20's drive much softer then the 21's which have thicker tires. Also they look a lot nicer as the stock sizes don't really look so proportioned and look a bit small. The GLE 63 for example runs much larger rims and tires stock and fits nicely and proportionally to the vehicles size which would be nice to match in the X6M or X5M.

So the reason I am asking is because I would love to eventually purchase 21's or even 22's but keep a thick tire on so that I could drive much more comfortably as there are many potholes and rough roads as everyone else here probably has experienced. If anyone could chime in with there thoughts as to if this would affect the speedo, or cruise I would greatly appreciate it. Speedo reading isn't a major issue as you could just adjust your speed unless you can somehow recalibrate the car to understand that its using a larger tire but losing function of your cruise control would suck for long drives. Also in regards to the spacer needed knowing proper offsets accounting for the larger sized tire when custom ordering rims would solve that issue as they could just account for the extra space needed for the rim to be pushed away from the side wall of the wheel well and not rub against any plastic.

Thanks in advance

-V