Performance vs all-season Tires for 21” Wheels

Can you please check the following links and see if they are of some help?

The links are helpful for understanding the difference between All Season and Winter tires. But I also know that all season and performance tires come in all sorts of styles, some grippier than others. I live in Seattle, where it snows a couple times a year and usually isn’t a lot, so the number of days actually driving on snowy roads is like 2-3 per year. The temperature also is fairly mild, winters rarely get cooler than 30 degrees during the day when I’d be driving. To me, this sounds like All Season year round would work well for me, but I’m curious if performance would make much of a difference. I don’t think it’s worth getting winter tires for such mild winters.

Unfortunately this article doesn’t give temperature information, but it at least gives distances.

Electric Sloth said:

Unfortunately this article doesn’t give temperature information, but it at least gives distances.

Click to expand...

These distances are super interesting and it’s definitely helpful info. Basically, summer tires win out on dry and wet surfaces, snow tires win out on snowy surfaces, and I honestly didn’t realize how poorly all season tires performed on wet surfaces.. the challenge is, summer tires just aren’t drivable in even the lightest snow - acceleration and stopping were abysmal.

Basically, summer (performance) tires are awful below about 40-45*F as the rubber gets hard and loses grip. My brother put his AWD A6 in the ditch with just a bit of snow dusting. If you are running summer tires in the PNW winters, you are asking for trouble. Once you have experienced dedicated winter tires, you will wonder why you waited so long. I live in the general area (I go between Vancouver, WA and Friday Harbor twice a month) and always have dedicated winter tires for the Oct-Apr period. Having traction is a good thing.