Quote:
Originally Posted by motornoter
It's true that much of what you read is too subjective to be useful. My view is, if you have a choice, go for the best wet road grip rating you can afford and, if possible, fit winter tyres from November to April. Who cares if the tyre's grip in the dry is 3% worse than the next man's - accidents happen when it's wet and cold, so if you've got the best tyres in those conditions, you stand a chance of avoiding the accident.
Personal experience has been mostly with my everyday Jaguar X-type 2.2 (front wheel drive, notoriously poor grip in wet and ice). I changed to Pirelli Cinturato Blues (only available at the time online from mytyres.co.uk) which had A+ wet road rating and the difference was really noticeable even compared to decent quality standard Pirelli Cinturatos. The car had traction control as standard because they are so prone to spinning the front wheels when accelerating in the wet - suddenly I could go just as hard in the wet as the dry, the traction control was hardly necessary. Great tyres, but the X had a habit of taking the inner edges off them, through to the canvas when only half worn. Tracking was checked and rechecked, no wear in the suspension, maybe it was just the way I drove it...
Anyway, point is, wet road grip ratings are real, so go with the best you can get. They might wear out a little quicker but if they keep your car on the road it's worth it. Unless you drive very high mileages, you probably won't notice the difference anyway.
Winter tyres are equally beneficial - it's worth picking up a secondhand set of wheels, get the winter tyres on them then you don't have to pay someone to keep swapping tyres twice a year. On lighter modern cars, which are often massively over-tyred in my opinion, it's worth keeping the winter tyres on all year round. I did that with a modern Fiat 500 - grip was superb all year round, including mountain-storming in the Alps and Pyrenees in mid-summer, and tyre life was fine. These little cars with wide tyres look 'cool' but are verging on dangerous in very wet conditions as the weight per square inch of contact surface is very low, so when you hit standing water, they aquaplane - major accident time. With winter tyres on, you're far, far safer as they disperse the water much more efficiently (bigger gaps between the rubber sipes = more weight per square inch of contact). Not so good on the X-type though as it wore winter tyres out in 5000 miles in the summer - too much torque & weight for the softer rubber to cope with, hence the need for two sets of wheels.
Hope this helps!
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Well to be honest it was the wet weather rating for overall braking distance and handling that prompted me to upgrade to a more expensive A rated tyre ( although I seem to have found a budget type price for a better tyre in the end) than usual after I realised the very poor categorisation of the existing tyres on my car.
My current minor obsession with tyres was sparked by the thread on here about DOT markings on tyres that I had never heard about before and upon checking my tyres after reading the thread found that I had been riding around for a year since the purchase of my current car on a 15 year old Dunlop tyre. So well done to whoever put the thread up thank you for helping to alert me to such a scenario.
It was a little bit of a wake up call and as mentioned prompted my decision to maybe aim a touch higher in the quality stakes in the future.
I take with a little pinch of salt the economy rating as whilst there will be different rolling resistances how much fuel economy is really affected between the different ratings % wise would be fairly minimal I'd guess. And of course the more grip you get on a tyre the correlation to more rolling resistance is generally the case.
So a C+A rated tyre seems to me to be the best balance on a top Wet weather rated tyre.
As regards winter tyres I do get the theme but to be honest the likes of myself are unlikely to get a whole seperate set of wheels to store in a house such as mine with limited storage space and then change them over a couple of times a year. I would if I thought it was essential such as is needed (even a legal requirement) in countries with worse weather than us here.
With a bigger budget and more storage space I would do the winter tyre thing but in the meantime will settle for the better wet weather rating tyres than I have had fitted in the past.
Cheers