Even in the days of belted and bias-belted tires there was little reason to cross-rotate tires. As always, perception is singly the most expensive item any of us will ever purchase.
I know everyone has seen the commercials from the '50s, depicting a platoon of ice-cream suited schmucks swarming all over a car that just pulled in for 45¢ of gas. Did your car need all that attention and fuss? Nawwww. Maybe you did but your car didn't. Funny how the movies would show someone with car trouble pulling into a gas station and then only one 'Goober' would shuffle out. Where was the Daytona pit crew then?
Anyway, back to perception and cross-rotation. "Well, helll, we got all his tires off... let's give him the razzle-dazzle and make him think we're on to something nobody else knows about." That's where cross-rotation came from, also see the same idiots that believed the best food came from the truck stop with all the trucks out front. Duhh.... ya think maybe somebody buying 150 gallons of diesel might be more inclined to go where the fuel was 15¢/gallon cheaper?
In case you haven't noticed I'm feeling wordy...
. Anyway, when the U.S. tire companies began making radials they didn't know much about them. They soon realized that steel was a good tread stabilizer but they didn't have the knowledge of how to make the rubber stick to the steel. They began having lots and lots of warranty issues with tire separations - where the steel and rubber part company. This was further exacerbated by the 'slight-of-hand' guys cross-rotating tires. The steel/rubber was already parting company in one direction, after being swapped around and forced into revolving in the opposite direction the tires were failing faster than Jethro in Harvard Law School.
After about ten years, the U.S. tire guys finally got a grip on the technology that Michelin had sewed-up forty years earlier. Steel was now sticking to rubber and cross-rotating was no longer destroying radials. But..... it was also not doing a dang thing other than impressing the natives. Liken it to an early urban myth that has been perpetuated by the blind leading the blind.
And that's all I got to say about that.
