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When I considered going over the max sidewall pressure, I thought it was interesting all tire brands seemed to use 44 or 51 PSI as the max. It seems those numbers are not necessarily based on the limits of the specific tire, but rather some industry standard. Are you going to tell me brand X and brand Y both designed their tire so that it could safely handle 51 PSI? And even if it was the true limit of the tire, the designers would have given it a pretty wide margin of error. Meaning if tests indicated that a tire will bubble or burst at 80 PSI, they are probably going to set the max pressure lower at maybe 60 PSI so that nobody even comes close to the actual limit. They would have to account for inaccurate filling station gauges and other factors.
And we have already discussed how center tread wear on over-inflated tires is not as true as many would seem to believe due to the modern construction of tires. Uneven wear is more likely due to poor tire maintenance like not rotating and not getting alignment checks.
But even with all that, MetroMPG already showed us that beyond 50 PSI the mpg gains taper off significantly. The benefit of running 60 PSI vs 50 PSI might not be worth the risk of going over the sidewall limit in some cases.
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