[throwaway0a5e]

This is a tire salesman trope that the "I like to sound like I care about other people's safety because the internet gives me virtue points when I do that" crowd picked up and ran with.

Ask anyone who works in the tire industry outside of sales and they will tell you that unless your tire was really, really abused or sat in the desert sun all the time 6yr is nothing and you should inspect the tire if you want to get an idea of how degraded it is.

Source: friends at cooper.

Personal anecdote time: Over the last year I went through a two and a half sets of old tires that I accumulated over the years for my van. I was intentionally doing burnouts daily to get through old stock as I planned to (and did) get new ones once I exhausted the old stockpile.

The only tires that had noticeably hardened and performed poorly (but oh boy did they do good burnouts) were the newest of the bunch and from 2016. The oldest ones were from 2009 and the half set was from 2012.