Sailun TerraMax RT Tire Review - Off-Roading on a Budget

The tire we’ve been invited to test is the latest member of the Sailun family, the TerraMax RT. Like most of the brand’s products, the goal with this new tire is to not necessarily be the best on the market, but rather be as good as the top tier tires while costing significantly less to purchase.

The RT in the TerraMax name stands for rugged terrain. This is an aggressive, purpose-built off-road tire, but one that is also street legal. It can be driven on paved surfaces and even freeways, but it’s more at home in the mud and dirt.

To handle more severe off-road conditions, Sailun gave the TerraMax RT a deep tread measuring 16-18/32s of depth. To help protect the tires from jagged rocks, the brand uses an anti-tear rubber compound for both the tread and the sidewall.

For rocks that are a bit looser, the tire features a square profile with V-shaped, staggered shoulder lugs that include stone ejectors. This means the RT’s have multiple levels, or tiers, within the tread. If a rock or stone gets stuck in the tread when pressed on the ground, it should naturally eject it out once pressure is off that part of the tire as it rolls upward.

Although winter is furthest thing from our minds while testing the TerraMax RT on a hot day in the Nevada desert, it is a 3 Peak Mountain Snowflake Certified tire. That means it should perform well in snow and can even be studded on LT versions.

For the evaluation, Sailun installed a set of the TerraMax RT tires to a slightly modified Jeep Wrangler. Our destination; the unmaintained trails of Nevada’s Red Rock Canyon Park.

To get there, we need to travel about 30 minutes across the freeway from Las Vegas. It’s a good opportunity to test Sailun’s claims about how quiet the TerraMax is for aggressive off-road tire. At freeway speeds, the tires don’t seem to be any quieter than other aggressively treaded all-terrain tires. They’re no louder either, just about what’s expected for the segment.

Once arriving at Red Rock Canyon, we ascend into the surrounding hills on a single lane off-road trail. To start, there’s a lot of loose surfaces with moderate sized rocks both loose and embedded in the ground. The Terramax RT seem to have no issues through here as slip is non-existent and we can see the tire flexing over the larger boulders.

Further up the trail, we encounter some washout passes that require driving the Jeep partially up the trail wall to avoid falling off the edge of the cliff. Here, a lot of trust in the tires and vehicle are needed. With most of the weight on the two left-side tires, the Terramax RT once again work as intended, handling the extra weight and grip requirements.

Nothing up to know is a challenge for an aggressive all terrain tire, but the next section tests them a bit more. It’s a rock garden where we need to gently drive between, and sometimes over, large boulders. There’s a lot of times where only one tire has any sort of usable traction and even then, only part of the tire is in contact with the ground. Having something with a knobby tread block like the Terramax is important as that might be the difference between powering through an obstacle or spinning out the tires and going nowhere.

Our final test was a long drive across a desert canyon that had been mostly washed out due to recent record-breaking rains. Unpredictable road surfaces are the norm and every 100 feet we could encounter sand, loose gravel, large washed-out ditches, or other random debris on the road. Here is maybe where the tires shine the best. The TerraMax RT needs to transition from high-speed travel over the sand to suddenly pushing the flex limits of the Jeep at slow speeds. All through this 45 minute driving section, the tires never fail and kept us moving forward.

The TerraMax RT can be had in 36 sizes, for wheels ranging from 17 to 22 inches, with an overall diameter of 33, 35 or 37 inches. The tires come with a 60 Months, 45,000 mi or 72,000 km warranty. Sailun even has some sizes available for the new crop of heavy, all-electric SUVs and trucks.

Like many Sailun products, the goal with the Terrmax RT isn’t to necessarily be the best street legal all-terrain tire for advanced off-roading. Instead, the brand hopes it matches up with the higher tier tires in the segment at a much lower price. After a day in the desert, we can say it looks like the brand has succeeded.