Martynn Randall is technical editor at Haynes and has been with us for approaching 30 years. He's written more than 60 Haynes publications and has owned more than 85 cars and 60 motorbikes... so far!
Blimey. It’s all gone a little bit ‘The Day After Tomorrow’, hasn’t it. Properly chilly. Long, balmy summer days are a distant memory and everything smells of cinnamon and spice. And worst of all, your car needs new tyres.
This puts you in a quandary, especially if you live in an area of the country that’s more susceptible to front, ice, and even snow, because which rubber do you choose? You could just go for the usual summer rubber, but you genuinely run the risk of sliding off the road when it’s icy and snowy. – summer tyres simply don’t work very well when winter is doing its thing.
Are winter tyres the best option?
The next obvious choice is to fit winter tyres. These are superb in the dark, cold months, because they’re designed to work at their best when the thermometer drops below 7C, and they also have extra grooves (called sipes) that are designed to find traction on snow. Brilliant, just stick those on.
Errr, not quite. You certainly can stick them on, and they’ll be brilliant in winter, but as soon as the temperatures start to climb they’ll offer less grip than a traditional summer tyre. And you face another annoyance, because you’ll need to either invest in a second set of wheels for your vehicle, which means you need to have somewhere to store them when they’re not in use, or you’ll need to have the tyres swapped twice a year. If only there was a convenient middle ground.
Happily, there is in the form of the all-season tyre. These are tyres that you can fit to your car and forget your worries about whether or not you’ll keep going in winter, or simply wear them out quickly in summer.
They’re designed to be at their best when summer and winter tyres are at their weakest – if Goldilocks was ever in the market for new tyres, she’d choose all-season items.
How do all-season tyres work?
An all-season tyre typically has a slightly softer compound than a summer tyre, so when the summer tyre is rock solid in icy temperatures, an all-season tyre is just that bit more flexible, which allows it to grip harder.
Similarly, a winter tyre has a really soft compound that allows it to grip hard, and while an all-season tyre is made of a slightly harder compound, it has most of the grooves (sipes, remember?) that allow it to find traction (and therefore braking performance, too) in snowy conditions.
An all-season tyre will also work better than a typical summer tyre in heavy rain.
Summing up all-season tyres
An all-season item does not represent tyre nirvana, but it does perform at a consistently high level in all weather conditions. So, summer tyres will provide the ultimate grip and traction in extreme heat, and winter rubber will do the same in snowy, sub-zero conditions, an all-season alternative provides much better performance than the summer tyre in winter, and the winter tyre in summer.
In short, it’s the perfect choice, more of the time. And better still, you don’t have to swap them when the seasons change.
