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After 4 agonizing days on Tire Rack, and help from this site (thanks Eric and Goldberg), I finally chose the Dunlops.
I live by Minneapolis, so snow can be an issue, but mostly the roads are plowed out within hours, and all we normally deal with are black ice on the bridges, and the lovely burnished ice at the 4 way stops. Still, when there is a foot of snow in the driveway and out to the main drag, agressive snow treads are wonderful.
I was hoping to keep the 16's as a permanent wheel size, and perhaps find a capable all season tire that easilly surpassed the MXV4's on the 02 linear.
The very impressive Conti Extreme Contact was a possible year round tire, with very good snow capability. However, this tire has amassed one of the largest "owner review" compilations that I have run into on the Tire Rack site (well over 300), mostly due to the intense love of the tires capabilities, or the intense anger over quality control. It seems that if you dont have time or patience or a great shop to get these right, you have a 50:50 chance that you will wish you had not chose these in the first place. It seems that Conti either had a horrible bad batch recently, or the tire can NOT be manufactured round. If you get a good set, you love them. If not, you will return for rebalance...generally a futile endeavor, as these tires seem to wobble or be very out of round. There are some VERY angry owners!
The Pirelli 120 tire is getting great reviews on the site, and I came close to buying these expensive tires, but when Tire Rack reviewed them against the Dunlop M2's (a year ago), the Pirelli just barely out handled the Dunlop, but was noisier and had less ice grip. The new M3 is said to be a vast improvement over the M2.
Since the Dunlop was also cheaper, it seemed to be a good solid choice for winter, and some dry road nicities as well.
The Pirelli P Zero Nero seemed to maybe be a great year round choice, but lots of owners of higher performance cars HATED the loss of the "sporty" in their sports car. Claims were made that they were to "soft". My read on this is that if you were going from a crap tire in a so-so car, the Nero would blow you away. I would like to believe the 9-5 is more than a so-so car, and maybe deserves a better summer tire than the Nero can be?
What really iced the decision was in looking at summer tires for the 17 wheel size, I saw the Goodrich G-Force "something" -2, which must be new enough that it only had like 12 reviews, but this seems like such an awesome way to go that it would be worth the steep price of admission. So...get the M3's for winter now, and then...
The owner reviews on any given tire on Tire Rack are always prejudiced towards the positive, I feel, since people would like to justify their new purchase decision, but the G-Force reviews went well beyond positive. More like "I cant believe it!!!" Anyone try them on their SAAB?
One thing confuses me about tread life.. The WINTER tires on the Tire Rack site show the owner review data in the "tire wear" rating to be nearly as high as the "all season" Conti Extreme, and the Nero??? Is this possible? My old WS-50's barely got through 2 winters! (15000 miles) Are the Winter Sports that much more durable than my old WS-50's or my old Artic Alpins???
Thanks for any imput!
Craig
posted by 206.191.194...
, Fri, 31 Oct 2003 11:58:24
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