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If you search "blizzak" and "hakka" on this forum, you'll come up with no shortage of opinions and experience.
As I write this, either by coincidence or design (likely the latter), there's a Tirerack banner ad for snow tires at the top of the site. Now, I loves me some Tirerack, having bought tires from them in the past (and will again soon), but I think they have this weird anti-studded tire thing going.
Basically, they claim, studded tires are inferior to studless. To prove it, their test of high-end, studless (so-called "friction") tires, e.g., Blizzak et al, pits them against a low-end studded tire. The friction tires do quite well against it.
But if you look at tire tests in Europe, you'll find a different story. I have a hard-copy of last year's tire test from Swedish newspaper Aftenbladet. In it, they test a bunch of studded and studless tires (at the Arctic Circle, using a really cool-looking Alfa Romeo!).
Braking and accelerating on snow and ice (tested separately) were all done better on *studded* tires. Driving on an ice "skid pad," studded did better; same goes for a short "track" circuit: lap times on studs were faster.
On wet asphalt, the tires with the best wet braking were ranked as the worst overall performers. The majority of well-ranked tires--studded or studless--went from 60-0 kmh in ~35-40m. (They did not test on dry pavement. Oh, all braking was done with ABS.) To give you a rough comparison, the studded Michelin did 60-0 in 38.2m; the studless did 35.8. Surprisingly, the studded Nokian Hakka5 did 38.4; the studless RSi did slightly worse at 39.2.
Unfortunately, many of the tires they tested are unavailable to us in N. America. The top tire, basically scoring the same as the Hakka5, was the Michelin X-Ice North (it's studded, NOT the same as the X-Ice we get). So the Hakka 5, according to Aftenbladet, is the best snow tire they tested that you can also get in N. America. (Are there better studded tires available only in the U.S.? Doubt it, but who knows...)
For studless, the best performing tire they tested that is available in N. America was the RSi (beaten by the Continental Conti Viking Contact 3, which I don't think is available here).
Incidentally, the studded Gislaved NordFrost 5 and studless SoftFrost 2 both garnered 5 and 3 "+" scores, respectively, the highest for studded and studless, again, respectively, and the same as the other top-scoring tires. I don't know if they're available in the States, though.
posted by 67.40.1...
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