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I think your approach wrt the tire rotations is a reasonably good idea, especially for those who want a tire with better dry road driving characteristics + fresh tread each winter. One of the reasons I don't like the law here wrt studs is that I do have to replace my winter tires at pretty low miles to keep the performance up (the wear rate with studs seems to be lower). That said, we don't put large amounts of miles on our cars, so we get about 4 winters on a set of tires. The last set got a torn sidewall on one tire (nicked at a construction site) at about 4 years old so one of the other 3 is on a full size spare + the other 2 are in limbo... The summer tires I'm running are not extreme performance + optimized for rain + low rolling resistance + have no siping. Fantastic for what they are, but I don't drive them if there's snow or ice. We have a set of older studless winter tires (that in no way measure up to the hakkas) that came with one of our cars + I've been running them down on the winter beater in spring/summer/fall (it sees little use in summer). I agree that your approach is simpler + gets more miles out of a set of tires. The all seasons will not ever have the same ultimate snow performance, so for me that's a no go...
I also agree, that on a purely logical basis, a tire with silica compounds or walnut shells or green diamonds or whatever sounds fantastic + should outperform one without (and in many cases probably do). Technology is good! I agree, I questioned the tire guy's comments too (and one can not put too much faith in salespeople of course!). That said, they have a lot of experience in what works in the local climate, and as you will see below, it looks like they were correct. One should always be careful about basing opinions purely on a handful of "specs" (I call it "armchair engineering": these kind of debates come up in the hifi world as well "all cd players sound the same" etc). Tire design has many variables + all those factors come into play, not just the compound. Tire depth is one factor in snow performance, but snow clearing is also a function of tread shape, gap widths + edge shapes etc. To make a good ice tire, one generally has to maximize surface area, which compromises gap widths + snow clearing. Overall, the hakkas over the years have been very good at that side of things. Not to say other brands are not good, but they all offer different compromises to the consumer.
wrt testing, the testing done in north america on winter tires is pretty sparse (+ a place like tire rack might be biased wrt the tires they sell). The testing in Scandinavia is much better (though the results can be very hard to read!). They tend to do lifetime testing as well. That's where I saw the Blizzak testing results I've referred to. There are various tests that can be googled. My general impression (based on reading these over the years) has been that the best winter tires (Blizzak, Nokian, Michelin etc) without studs are fairly comparable new with some pros + cons between models (and "performance" winter tires do not shape up as you note, and to be honest I totally disregard those anyway: when I say Blizzak, I mean the real WS50/60/70 etc depending on the age of the test). Good studded tires seem to fare better still. After some miles are put on the tires, the differences become more significant (to the point where in one review, the Blizzaks were determined to be too dangerous to use)...
I did find an interesting tire test video from Nokian (so obviously, there is risk of bias there, as they want to sell tires, but there is interesting information regardless) that compares their winter tires with other (unmentioned brands') tires. See link below to part 2 (and you can find part 1 in the youtube sidebar). What is interesting to me is the tires they used in the test: Hakka R, Hakka 5 *unstudded*, and WR. This is neat because one can compare the 3 main tires Nokian makes without studs. One of the tests is straight line stopping distance: Hakka R 210ft, Hakka 5 198ft, WR 267ft, and the best other brand "premium winter" tire shown (which may have been cherry picked to some degree, we do not know of course) was 213ft and all seasons at 300+ft. Similar results for SUVs. In other third party testing, the Hakka R was at the top of the list of friction tires, so it is a very good winter tire (ie this is not comparing the unstudded Hakka 5 with a sub par tire) + shares the characteristics of other top tier friction tires like Blizzak...
This demonstrates unambiguously what I have been saying: the unstudded Hakkas are comparable in stopping distance to a pure friction tire (in fact performed significantly better in this test). From experience, straight line stopping is the weakest element of those tires. So now, I will go back to my original comments: the old, worn out studded hakkas were significantly better on ice than the brand new unstudded hakkas and similarly good in deep snow + slush including at high speeds. Studs make a difference! It was night + day!
I think your rule about not running studdable tires without studs is generally a good rule of thumb even if it is not always perfect. I would love to run studs here! My point though, that studs are not obsolete, I think is quite valid, though it does have factors of opinion depending on one's interests (there are good reasons to not like studs, eg noise, though from our government's perspective on road damage, they are still looking at information from the 1970s, not modern stud designs, and it is frustrating)... certainly studs are still popular in the ice racing community!
apologies to all for the length - hard to debunk this without being verbose!
cheers,
James...
posted by 67.158.70...
infomercial tire test video (part 2)
, Sun, 12 Dec 2010 11:12:16
, Mon, 13 Dec 2010 17:19:28, Mon, 13 Dec 2010 11:48:02
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