I hate to question our most authoritative source here, but are you sure about that? I was under the impression that most high performance tires these days were unidirectional (ie you had to buy left and right versions, so that the tread would be rotating in the correct direction). I was also under the impression that the old left-to-right rotation patterns were for old bias ply tires, and that radials were only supposed to go front-to-back because when you reverse the direction of radials once they've been worn in for a while they have a tendency to shed their tread down to the belts. Which actually happened to me with two tires in a set back in college.

Of course, it's certainly possible that rubber formulation advancements in the last fifteen years have eliminated that problem. Can anyone confirm that the Pilots are not unidirectional, and that Michelin's recommendations don't exclude side-to-side rotating?

Cheers,

Greg