STRANGELY enough, it wasn't the car the tires were on that showed me how good they were, it was the car on which they weren't.
I put a test set of Michelin X-Ice severe service winter tires on our Mazda MPV, and was impressed enough with the improvement in cornering, braking and accelerating over the Yokohama AVID TRZs they replaced. (Even Yokohama says the AVID TRZs are not winter tires.)
But it wasn't until I was having a hoot handbrake-turning the Hyundai Accent, shod only with good all-season tires (but all-season is usually just a misnomer), that I realized how much of an improvement the X-Ices really were.
In winter, our driveway builds up a nice snowbank that makes for a hard right turn to park in the right spot of our driveway. So over the course of two weeks in the Accent, while the street was still covered in snow, I had pretty much perfected an early turn-in with a quick yank on the handbrake to spin the car into just the right position to enter the driveway.
Then I tried it on the X-Ice-shod MPV: the van just stopped. No sliding, no yaw, just stop.
Granted, I wasn't going that fast, but a good handbrake yank should be enough at most speeds.
Of course, in the right conditions, any tires will be defeated by the right amount of brain infarction, but it's clear that these X-Ice tires raise that level considerably.
It was a slippery drive that Saturday morning to Curtis Tire to get the X-Ice mounted. It was a very different drive back.
The van stops when asked. Confidence is improved in cornering and acceleration is a dream. It's enough that a good set of winter tires on a front-wheel-drive vehicle is better than an all-wheel-drive vehicle with just all-seasons. That much was evident comparing the MPV to the Honda Ridgeline I had for a few days that only had all-season tires.
The ultimate, though, would be to have an all-wheel-drive car with good winter tires.
Winter tires work because they remain flexible in lower temperatures than all-season tires. They also have numerous little slits called sipes that increase the amount of gripping surfaces.
The history of winter tires has created some reluctance by consumers to make the switch. When all-season radial tires were introduced in the 1970s, even the worst all-season was better in winter than the best bias-ply winter tire. So that created the expectation among consumers that they could avoid the twice-yearly tire change.
But new rubber compounds and new tread designs make winter tires so much better that in some areas, real winter tires are mandatory in winter.
True winter tires are distinguished by the symbol of a snowflake against a mountain. Without that symbol, the tire is merely a winter pretender. To use the symbol, tires must pass a test comparing their traction against an all-season tire. Mud-and-snow (M+S) tires face no such test.
This report was prepared using tires supplied by the manufacturer.
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