Re: Cooper winter tires

[Steve Patriquen <spatric1@maine.rr.com>]

I've been running Cooper Wintermaster studded winter tires on AWD cars for
three years. I bought them for my Eclipse, and they conveniently are the
same size as the A4 tires (205/55-16). They are "lightly" studded and I
have about 25k miles on them over the three winters. They are quieter than
the Dunlop unstudded winters on our Passat GLX.

The more you know about snow, the more you realize how different conditions
can be. Driving to the ski hill in nice fresh powder is different than
trying to make it home in 6" of slush or on a completely iced-over road. I
lived in Canada (New Brunswick) most of my life and drove in snow from Nov.
to April every year. I've had RWD, FWD, 4WD and AWD vehicles - tried
all-seasons, ran snow tires all year on a Jeep, etc. Now it's two sets of
rims with a performance all-season for summer and real snows for winter for
everything but the old 4WD pickup (and motorcycles :-) It's funny, but when
I lived in Canada I almost never heard of the Scandanavian snow tires
available now - I think Canadian Tire is such a massive retailer they left
no market share.

I like the standard-width studded snow, because it offers OK (not great)
handling on dry or simply wet pavement (better than a narrower tire) while
still offering an open tread with soft rubber for actual snow. Then add a
few studs so I at least have some directional control on ice, and it works
for me. I also believe the studs slow down the rate that the tire wears
out. YMMV - I lived in Toronto for five years and found snow tires
unnecessary - just ran good all seasons (and washed the salt off daily.
They used to use a 1-1 mix of salt to snow :-)

I hope someday to move somewhere where people say "What's a snow tire?"

Steve P - 98.5 A4TQMS - 97 Passat GLX - 94 Kawa ZG1000