Tire Question From Someone New to Winter

Hello. I've been low-key shopping for some sort of sports car lately and started thinking about mods, as one does. That led me to thinking about tires. Running sticky summer tires year-round was never a problem when I was in CA but now I'm in Portland. Suddenly I have to deal with plenty of days that are colder than summer tires are happy with. What does the PNW set do for good tires?

Also, could one of the mods fix my thread title? I'd like to buy an "R."

Not PNW, but Appalachia to mid Atlantic

DD has been a 95 miata set up for auto-x (coilovers, exhaust, etc)

Summer I am on 15x7's with (iirc dunlop direzza ZII)

Winter, E30 bottlecap wheels with general artic artimaxes (or however its spelled, find them on tire rack, they are cheap and good)

Furthermore, I did time in the mountains of western MD with it and had to go up dirt/gravel hills to get to moms house regularly. It was always snow covered.  I never failed to make it to the top.  Also, I have an open diff and no abs. Only concerns would be if snow was deep enough to beach it. So you track depth and progress of local snow removal and dont be an idiot in a really bad storm (which locally would be a foot or two overnight)

I am seeing some rocker rust now after 4-5 years of this treatment ( and western md is VERY HEAVY on salt roads stay white till 2-3 good rains after season)

Aside from the wheel swap, softening up the koni's, and putting on the hardtop not much to tell.  Oh yeah, spraying under carriage with Fluid Film. https://www.amazon.com/Fluid-Film-11-75-Spray-3-pak/dp/B00B93ZXGS/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1513673924&sr=8-3&keywords=fluid+film  just to slow down the rusty march.

Look into local laws on studs vs no studs.  Blizzacks are wonderful I hear, but pricier.  I didnt go studs because I didnt want the limitations and have only had a few ice situations where I think they would have been any help. Think about it, read what tire rack has to say, talk to locals about ice storms vs snow showers. I would say if laws are good on them and you see more ice than snow consider it.  I see/saw more snow than ice.

Just get a cheap second set of wheels, throw snows, and learn to countersteer.   Snowy parking lot doughnut practice actually has purpose 

Any curiosities not covered?

*edit, dont know what PNW area you are going to be/what conditions would be.  setup advised above might work for canadian level winter while you might just have the cold and wets.  

I lived in Canada for a bunch of years, then Boston, and now NYC and NJ. Pretty wide variety of winter driving conditions.

What I’ve learned is that you need to be realistic about your winter tire needs. Are you really driving in deep snow and ice (ex: ski trips in the back country) or mostly slushy wetness (ex: plowed highways and city streets) ... that’s the key question. 

Some winter tires are designed for “real” snow/ice use. Think of them as off-road tires. Hakkapeliittas are probably the classic example. They’ll have amazing traction if you’re crawling around a mountain road that has never seen a plow or salt. But out on the highway in dry conditions, it’ll feel like you’re on 20 year-old retreads. 

Some winter tires, like the Pirelli Sotto Zeros I tried last season, are glorified all-seasons. They feel great at highways speeds in a powerful car. Good steering feel; not much sidewall deflection. But they’re hardly better than all-seasons in real snow and ice. 

So, it’s a trade-off. You need to be realistic about what your needs actually are. Again, if you live in the city and do most of your driving on salted/plowed main roads, you probably don’t need hardcore snow tires. 

For me, I’ve found the Michelin X-Ice has the best balance of “actual” snow use and “regular” use in a RWD car. 

Portland?

Dude, run summers year round. Seriously. You don't need winter or even 3-season tires unless you're going over the pass.

In reply to thatsnowinnebago :

I live in Minnesota yes we get a lot of snow in the winter. snow and Ice 

Blizzacks are best   But don’t leave them on once the weather warms up past 45 they get hot they get hard and wear out fast.  

Michelin is a good compromise  for year around rain, snow, and ice if you are careful.    No they aren’t best for cone carving.  

We only rarely get real winter in OK, ie a snow that stays on the ground for more than 2-3 days, but it does get plenty cold here. January and February, it's not uncommon to have the high hover around freezing. 

But here we are mid-December at 6:45am CST it's still dark and 55° out.

IE, I had no problem running Star Specs year round on the BRZ. They just slide around a little more 

Portland doesn't get much snow, and when it does it tends to be of the ice variety rather than the powdery stuff we see in the midwest. You'll be best off running something like Michelin's X-Ice, which is suited to low temps and ice, than something with full-depth tread like the General Altimax Arctic., which throws off deep snow like nobody's business. 

In reply to thatsnowinnebago :

Your R has been applied. You should receive an invoice in the mail soon. 

I run Blizzaks here in Portland currently (and previously ran X-Ices, just a matter of what I read right before ordering); it's possible I'm being paranoid, but I basically do it as a hedge against two things: the ice I wasn't expecting, and the possibility of needing to go somewhere when we do get that random snow.

If you were here last year, you'll recall that we don't know how to cope with it. We don't have enough plows to actually clear things, and we got that weird pattern of refreezing. So it was actually a little hard to drive, then easy, then 6" deep ice ruts of doom. When it got to that last part especially, I pretty much decided to let everyone else have the roads, as not having someone even less prepared throw their car at me when it jumped a rut sounded pretty much like a crapshoot.

I never tested either the Blizzaks or X-Ices hard, and am no connoisseur of winter tires, but was happy enough with both. I have the latter on a Mini, and ran the former on a WRX, so I'm afraid driving impressions comparisons are beyond me. The Blizzaks are noisier than all-seasons, but I think actually quieter than the RE-71Rs I had on the Mini this summer.

For 30 years of the 35 I have been driving, all of my winters were driven on snow tires.  Some even with studs.

And I would totally be in the "best snow tire you can get" camp, except for the last 5 years, I've driven on the all season tires that were delivered with my car.  

My winters have always had snow at some point, have always had ice at some point, have always had mixed, dry, wet, etc...  The only thing I would not want to try in all season tires is if the snow was over 5".  And if I see that, the liklihood of me driving to work or anywhere is remote anyway.

For Portland, I'd just go with some good all season tires.  Or for one set, a good set of summer tires.  Don't drive when it's icy.  Nobody there knows how to drive when it's icy anyway.

In reply to Ransom :

I was here last year for Snowpacalypse 1-4. Allegedly, that sort of winter is not normal here, right?

We mostly get the cold and wets here. I don't bother driving much when it does snow and/or ice. I commute on the train and can work from home if need be, so it's really not worth the risk. The cold/wet part is what has me unsure. I've read enough threads and trust everyone enough here to know that snowy weather = snow tires and personal experience in CA says that Hankook RS2s are great in the heart of "winter." I feel like Portland is in some awkward middle ground, climate-wise, between snows and summers.

In reply to thatsnowinnebago :

Sounds like a pretty good summary to me. Seems like "unusual" winters have been more frequent than when I first moved to Oregon in '85, but it's still really slight compared to genuinely cold parts of the country. It does also seem to lack a great pattern about what it does. I want to say it's more normal for it to snow, then go away completely in a few days and that only happening one or two times, as opposed to the crazy refrozen mess we had last year. Having it ice back over while it was still inches thick was a mess.

If you can give it a miss, that's the ideal answer. Beyond that, it depends so much what/where your driving is. If I didn't leave inner Portland and skipped the snowstorm, I could stay on RE-71Rs all year. Given that I want a bit more flexibility than that, I like winters as the safest option for unexpected conditions, since our area can get ice in spots without being generally snowy/icy, and as long as I'm swapping seasonal tires anyway. The winters are perhaps better suited than all-seaons to 37 and rainy, and I feel that they give me a small additional margin for that one time conditions are a little colder than I thought. A sane person could easily decide it's not worth the bother.

Cold and wet should still be OK with all seasons - proper high performance summer tires are going to be somewhat unhappy due to the temperature, but a decent set of all seasons should work OK.

Re studs - I would advise against them. They're really only good when you get a bunch of ice, if you don't, they're more of an annoyance.

BoxheadCougarTim said:

Cold and wet should still be OK with all seasons - proper high performance summer tires are going to be somewhat unhappy due to the temperature, but a decent set of all seasons should work OK.

I'm not sure how accurate this is. I follow your logic, but I did a trackday in 17-30 degree temps at Summit a few months back. Everybody was still running R-comps, including me. At 17* they were pretty slippy, but by 30* there was no reason to run anything else.

But once there's snow on the ground? No way. Wrong tread pattern.

In reply to Blaise :

Track days put more heat in the tire than street driving. At least ticket-free street driving .

True, but I've also driven Summer tires in near-freezing temps (without snow) and I'm not sure I can honestly say that my winter tires had better feel or grip. Hmm. Once its below freezing or snow though, there's no question.

Cold summer tires will tend to let go much more suddenly than winter tires when it's cold.  So even if actual grip is similar, the winters will be easier / nicer to drive.  

I ran summer-only in PA a few years.  They sucked hardcore but I just got a little head of steam before going up my driveway.  I once had to get AAA to tow me 6" to get out of a parking spot that was icy.

But, its hard to beat good winter tires for snow and occasional ice.  If you don't have snow and ice, don't get winter tires.  Period.  Its wasted money.  Switch to HP all seasons.  They are 90% as good in the summer and 6000% better than summer rubber in the cold temps.  Those aren't real numbers.  I am being hyperbolic.

I have a set of Kumho Ecsta ASX on the Impala SS right now.  They don't get hard in the winter and they do fine in light snow.  They also exceed the rest of the car's ability in the summer.

I think I was one of only a handful of people in Vancouver BC who ran winter tires back when I lived there.  But when that occasional meager dump of snow happened and everyone freaked out and the entire city shut down, ~I~ was out and about and getting things done.

Wet coastal snow is a bit of a challenge - a good wet dump of snow needs a SNOW tire to dig in. But that snow so quickly turns into ice from people who can't drive in it, that you need an ICE tire to grip.

I'd probably lean towards a good ICE tire like the Michelin X-Ice or the General Altimax Arctic or Bridgestone Blizzak. I had a set of Toyo G02's back in the day that were frighteningly grippy, and the reason why I run FOUR winters now. I have X-Ice on the 2wd '77 C10 and MADE IT to the school on the only "snow day" the district called in 35 years.

Living in Alaska, I run Blizzaks or modern studs like the General Arctic Altimax's from October to April and all-seasons the rest of the year (Cooper CS5 Ultra Touring's currently).

In Portland?  I'd have no problem with a good all-season like the Continental DWS or the Hankook Ventus something's in the Tire Rack's High or Ultra High Performance category.  If you want a more comfy tire, the Cooper Ultra Touring CS5 was fine on my Outback in Alaska down to the wear bars even on the first snows of the season.  

When it snows in Portland the city basically shuts down.  Take the day off.  I wouldn't suggest snow tires unless you need to go up to the mountains skiing.  I wouldn't try to persuade you from having a set of all season tires that are good in the rain.  You'll get lots of wet weather driving.  Use Rain-X on all your windows and carry a water blade (made for drying off a car after a wash) to get all the condensation of your windows when it's not raining but everything is still wet.  I used to fly to Portland 5 nights a week.  

I live in Central MD.  Around here winter weather can be 1/4" of ice or 1" to a foot or more of wet or dry snow.  We get a bit of everything almost every winter.  Since 2000 I have used Continental DWS's on a Focus and a Transit Connect, also on the wife's Buick LeSabre and her Subaru Legacy.  The only one I had any trouble with was the Transit Connect because of the way traction control worked.

In my opinion, unless you frequent the mountains/passes, a high quality all-season like the Continental DWS is pretty much perfect for the PNW.  It's much better than dedicated winter tires for >99% of the driving you'll have to do.  For that other <1%, if the conditions are bad (icy) enough that the DWS won't cut it, then you have no business being on the roads anyway.  There is no dedicated winter, or even studded, tire made that I would trust to safely go down the many steep hills around here once they're coated with ice.

There's always the "all season tire/cable chains (or even better, Autosocks) to get you out of trouble" idea. Then, the only time you're using maximum traction (and paying for it) is when you need it. 

I always hated winter tires, even in PA.  Fortunately, winter tires have gotten better in non-winter conditions, but it always bothered me that I bought a complete extra set of tires and wheels for $1000 to use them for maybe 50 miles of their intended use.  I needed them for my 100' driveway that had a spring seeping water out of it and sometimes froze, and I needed it for about 5 days out of the winter when I had to go to work before the plow/salt trucks came through.

When my blizzaks wore out (from 99% driving on dry pavement all winter) I just bought some all-seasons and spent $500 on upgrading my rear diff to an LSD.