Adavanta is an obscure brand catering to a strange audience. Known more generally as Argus Adavanta, the tire company builds passenger car tires, light truck tires, and commercial vehicle tires. What’s strange about Argus Adavanta is that all their passenger and light truck tires are simple all seasons, and low end all seasons at that. They are built to cater to the very bottom of the all season tire market, and are built to be just a bit tougher than everything else at the bottom of said barrel. The tale only gets more curious when their parent company is brought into the conversation, a business with a history of producing awesome off road tires. How Adavanta got started is still a bit of a mystery, especially considering the lofty nature of the company’s apparent parentage. This one fell far from the tree.
Advanta Tire Company Information & Background
Adavanta, or Argus Adavanta, is a brand owned by American Pacific Industries. API was founded in 1982 in Scottsdale Arizona, and has long focused on high performance off road tires. More recently American Pacific Industries has widened their portfolio, including lines for premium high performance tires, extreme off road tires, standard passenger car tires, and others.
API’s premium road tire line is Zenna, their off road lines are X Comp and Gladiator, and their general purpose tire brand is Argus Adavanta. Distributed by exclusively U.S. AutoForce, Adavanta builds a wide variety of tires, ranging from performance passenger car tires, to commercial truck tires for semi trucks.
While they are a small tire company with limited distribution, they have a range of markets and tire genres that they attempt to compete in.
They compete in these markets while producing tires in an eco friendly manner, and offering some of the best warranties in the global tire industry. Perhaps as a result of their off road tire company parentage, Advanta puts priority on durability, and then advertises that durability with said exceptional warranties.
Adavanta might seem unknown, but their parentage is as reliable as they come. Their philosophy is toughness, executed with pride.
Advanta Tire Cost & Pricing
Cost wise, Adavanta tires appear to generally be less than most brand names tires. When compared to similar sizes of the Dunlop SP Sport 7000 A/S, Adavanta HPZ-01 tires were noticeably cheaper. The SP Sports retail for nearly a hundred and ninety dollars each, while the Adavanta HPZ-01s of a very similar size sell for roughly a hundred and twenty four dollars. These tires are both in the high performance all season category, and neither are top performers in the category. It should be noted that Adavanta has strange tall and narrow sizing that rarely matches up with most other tire brands. While they certainly fit a wide array of cars, Adavanta sizes appear to prioritize larger and narrower wheels.
On the lower end of the all season tire segment, the ER-700 can be had for under seventy bucks. The Continental TrueContact, a stalwart in the same category, is upwards of ninety dollars. These stats are for the 205/60-R16 size. That said, the TrueContact is almost certainly a higher quality tire than the “Economy Radial 700.” Adavanta tires are tough, and relatively inexpensive. But if performance is one of your requirements, they do not rank highly in that metric.
Advanta Tire Warranty
Adavanta warranties are the company’s main selling point. The mileage of their warranties is not that special, ranging from forty thousand miles to sixty thousand miles. What is special is their one hundred percent replacement policy, which is exactly what it sounds like. If one of their tires fails within the warranty period, including simply having more wear than it should for said mileage, they will give you a tire to replace the one that did not perform to spec. The stipulations that enable this are relatively straight forward, mainly that the tires were properly installed, and were inflated to the correct PSI level. The warranty only applies to the person who bought the tires to begin with, but is still an ample safety net.
For the passenger car market and commercial tire market, this is a great policy, but it still isn’t quite the same as the warranty behind the original American Pacific Industries’ Gladiator off road tire series, or the later X Comp tires, for that matter.
Tire Options
Adavanta manufactures tires made to appeal to those who mainly require longevity, and would rather not pay the full price that comes with a big name tire that may have a similar reputation. While their warranty and toughness appears to be the real deal, the performance of Adavanta tires, especially in the snow, appears to be lacking almost across the board. This might be due to the company not having testing resources, or relationships with other more established manufactures.
In any case, it is a handicap, though perhaps not a very large one when considering the tires are cheaper than their counterparts to a reasonable degree. Adavanta does not have a wide selection of tire either, with essentially their entire catalog more or less being variations on all season tires. They do not have true performance tires available, not even true performance-oriented all seasons.
What they do have to pick from are cheap, low end all season tires with a great warranty and perhaps greater than average toughness.
Not much to choose from, but for some that is all they might be interested in.
Advanta Tire Technologies & Features
Technology is not Adavanta’s strong suit. In the Western world, their tires might seem cheap, and therefore not need a bunch of bells and whistles. But there are multiple Indonesian tire companies that produce significantly cheaper tires, and these significantly cheaper tires last roughly as long and have much higher performance.
Adavanta’s main feature when it comes to their very basic all season tires appears to be adding a little extra reinforcement. Besides that, they exist at the bottom of the barrel in terms of capability, even when compared with their contemporaries in the low capability all season tire categories.
Information on the company’s research and development capabilities is not forthcoming, though due to the cost of their tires it does appear they are not produced in an outsourced factory. In any case, Adavanta does not have any performance improving technology or tire compounds worth writing home about. Even the basic construction of the tires seems very simple.
Advanta Tire Durability & Longevity
Buoyed by their 100% replacement warranty, the apparent durability of Adavanta tires appears to be their greatest strength. Tough, dumb, and reliable seems to be the Adavanta creed. That said, since all Adavanta passenger tires are very low end tires, their durability is only better than other tires at the very bottom of the all season category in terms of both price and capability. Since longevity of all season tires is one of the main points of the category, as one goes down in price, the durability tends to go down as well. That is because durability is one of the driving factors regarding price in the all season segment.
This explains why the cheaper than standard Argus Adavanta tires tend to have short, but powerful warranties. Their durability is good, but only for the segment which they are built for. So really, Adavanta tires are the toughest dirt cheap all season passenger car tires one can get, at least before going to the higher quality and cheaper still Indonesian tires.
This might be Adavanta’s niche, but it does not appear to be a very useful part of the tire spectrum, which explains why they are so small and unknown.
Summary & Overall Thoughts
Argus Adavanta has a strange place in the tire world. The big names tend to vie for the glory at the top. They build the greatest and best tires at the highest level of performance, using the latest research and development in attempts to beat their big name competitors. These big names care less about the medium and low levels of the tire world, making room for newcomers and relative small timers. American Pacific Industries is one of those apparent small timers, having truly built something worthwhile with their high performance and incredibly tough Gladiator series of off road tires.
But their Adavanta is the runt of the litter. Currently working the niche of building the very toughest bargain basement tires, for an audience that only questionably exists.
Those who do their research will know they can get higher quality, better performance tires for every application Adavanta builds tires for. But those who are not in the know will likely never hear of Adavanta to begin with. They are tiny and obscure, building tires that don’t warrant much press anyway.
API builds some of the world’s best off road tires, and their new lines of road and truck tires should get their due. As for Adavanta, however, obscurity is likely deserved.
Advanta Tire Models
All Season Touring
- ER-700
- TRG-750
High Performance All-Season
- HPZ-01
- HPZ-01+
Light Truck/SUV
- ATX-750
- HTR-700
- SVT-01