[s-cars] Winter Tires??

[Taka Mizutani]

Now you're getting into hyperbole, Scott. While your point about driving
skill is definitely a good one and valid.

That said, there is a reason why some of the European car mags do tire
testing on winter tires- some tires simply do better on certain types of
surfaces than others. With that information, it makes it a lot easier to
match a tire to your particular driving conditions.

Arguing that you have the wrong vehicle is just silly- there are plenty of
people in the snow belt that do not drive SUVs and pickups and get around
just fine. But having tires that can cope better with fresh snow is
important if you deal with it on a daily basis. Performance on dry roads
may be irrelevant if you're always on snow-covered roads and it snows often
in your locale. Most people don't have the luxury of just switching cars.

Tire performance on dry and wet roads is also tested frequently. Are you
going to discount all of those tests as well? Driver skill is a larger
factor than whether one high-performance tire is slightly better than the
other.

Finally, with the current cars and their electronic aids, a tire that
performs well might be all that more important- ESP takes a lot of driver
skill out of the equation until you exceed the performance envelope within
which the system operates. Without a good tire for the conditions,
non-defeatable ESP will thwart your inputs, sometimes to the point of being
dangerous when the car becomes unresponsive because it thinks you're doing
something crazy.

Taka