gogogophers… FFS, winter tires are for use in winter. Whether it snows or not, and whether you are happy to wait for the roads to clear is irrelevant, because numerous links and sites have been mentioned about what winter tires do and when they are to be used – and it’s not all about snow.
IT’S NOT ABOUT SNOWFALL ONLY.
If you drive on SUMMER TIRES, which specifically point out that THEY SUCK AND ARE DAMAGED IN COLD WEATHER (links have been shared), your skill is irrelevant.
Winter tires grip better on all road conditions when it get cold; their compound is not damaged; their stopping distances are better; they will grip when other tires slip, etc.
YES… essentially, we’re all screwed at 30" of snow, but don’t be driving behind me on summer tires when it’s cold, cold and snowy, cold and damp, or… just COLD.
Tire Rack: read up some on winter and summer tires. It’s all there. hundreds of notes and instructions from manufacturers and experts.
Links have been provided which demonstrate the chemical challenges associated with summer tires in cold temps. You drive on summer tires in cold temps. You are less safe. You might have damaged your tires. Your ABS will not stop your car as fast. This has all been posted. To defend your position is ridiculous.
Michelin Energy Saver, which is specified by Michelin as a summer tire: “Summer tires are primarily designed for high-performance vehicles and provide optimal dry and wet performance levels in a temperate environment. Summer tires are not designed to be used during the winter season where temperatures are colder and approach freezing consistently as their performance would be less than optimal.”
Michelin Energy Saver A/S, which is an all-season tire: “All-season tires are designed to provide balanced dry and wet performance levels, as well as acceptable snow traction in regions with light winter weather. A/S tires are a practical solution designed for year round usage with typically a longer tread life.”
Michelin Energy Saver LTX, which is an all-season tire for light trucks: “All-season tires are designed to provide balanced dry and wet performance levels, as well as acceptable snow traction in regions with light winter weather. A/S tires are a practical solution designed for year round usage with typically a longer tread life.”
I think part of the problem here is that in wintry parts of the country, true summer tires are pretty unheard of. I worked at a couple of shops that sold tires and the only time I ever saw a real summer tire was if it came OEM on some fancy performance car. I think we could order them, but I don’t recall us ever actually selling one. In our day-to-day parlance you had “winter tires” and “summer tires” but the summer tires were of course all seasons. I could see how that could be confusing.
That pretty much sums it up. A big storm is a big storm, regardless of how many time throughout the year are other big storms. For cities, a single big storm paralyses the city for a greater or lesser period of time, depending on the city’s snow removal capacity, and on the drivers driving with skill and using snow tires (buy your president some snow tires – that trip from the airport the White House was embarrassing). Multiple big storms don’t make any single storm worse, other than to make it more difficult to dispose of the snow. A big storm in a city that due to it rarely having big storms does not have much snow removal capacity can reasonably be expected to cause a great deal more disruption than it wold to a city that regularly has big storms and has accordingly invested in sufficient snow removal capacity. The same goes for use of true snow tires. That’s why in a big storm it will be easier to get around in Minneapolis than Washington.
I’m curious as to where you usually drive, gogogophers, for there is a great deal of variation between locations.
Minnie (45 of snow inches a year) and most of MN is not mountainous (mostly laid out on a grid), and gets a decent amount of snow compared to other inland Midwest states, but not a particularly large amount, and due to the relatively cold temps, when it dumps the snow tends to be drivable rather than the personal lubrication level of slippery snow from lake effect storms.
At the top of MN along the coast of North Shore of Superior, from Duluth to Thunder Bay in Canada, the annual snowfall is about 80 inches, but falls back to somewhere in the mid 50s further inland in the MN’s north woods. In the big storms, which tend to occur when we are not in a deep freeze, the snow tends to be wet and dense, which makes for poor driving conditions due to it being slippery – not much in the way of sharp pointy snowflakes to prick into your tires (read up on waxing for cross country skiing for an intro on how snow density and moisture content greatly affects your ability to grip or to slide on snow). Much of Duluth is built on a steep shoreline, so it can be challenging to get about there during a winter storm. Much of the road north is fully exposed to the storms, so it too can be slow going. To put it in perspective, a friend drove up from Minneapolis on all season tires to ski at Lutsten, but could not make it up the road to the parking lot because of a few inches of fresh wet snow on it – that’s all season tires for you.
For total snowfall in the region, all this pales in comparison with what goes on out at the end of Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula on the South Shore of Superior, where Mt. Bohemia gets buried with and an annual average of 273 inches of snowfall per year – and it is wet, slippery snow at that. Minnie’s 45 inches of dry, grippy snow compared to Bohemia’s 273 of wet, slippery snow? Not much of a comparison.
But for driving conditions, even that is not that bad compared to what goes on across the lake on the Canadian side, where all bets are off for winter storm driving, multi-hour snow closures are the norm, and it is not unusual for the highway is closed for a day or more. It is a combination of the wet, slippery snowfall amounts of 74 to 129 inches per year, depending on location, plus exposure to the full force of the storms, plus the very rugged terrain – up, down, around, up, down, around, including the steepest grades in a province nearly the size of Texas and Montana combined – that make it extremely difficult to get through during a winter storm. I’m not kidding about having crawled past a line of transports that were stopped on the road – not the shoulder, the actual travelling lane – during a winter storm, or having a shit-le-merde moment dodging a transport that slid backwards down a steep hill toward me and wrecked, or an hour after meeting with a couple of clients, then coming across their trucks which they had driven off the road while lost in the storm. This is what storm driving entails up here. There simply are no similar driving conditions on the other side of the lake in Minnesota, let alone Minneapolis or anywhere in the interior of the state, and as brutal as it get here on the North Shore, I still wouldn’t call it mountainous conditions, for although the grades and bends are what you would find in mountainous areas, and the slipperiness is at par for the front faces of coastal ranges and worse than the interior ranges, the volume of snow per storm is not as high, which makes all the difference when it reaches your up to your vehicle’s doors.
Since the North Shore of Lake Superior across the lake in Ontario isn’t mountainous, I’m curious where in Minnesota you drive that is mountainous?
I fully appreciate and agree with your point about the necessity of diver skill in winter driving. Being very gentle on the gas, brakes and steering are necessary on snow or ice, but that being said, I cringed when you mentioned losing traction several times in a ten mile round trip, for I can’t recall the last time I broke traction (other than either when I have been practicing, or when the snow has been up to my doors and floating the chassis and body, which isn’t really a problem of losing traction with a tire that is on the ground, but rather losing traction because the tire is no longer in contact with the ground at all). In my books, breaking traction is a big risk, for if it happens at the wrong time, such as when stopping, turning, sitting on a slope, or dodging an unexpected obstacle, pedestrian or vehicle, the consequences could be very serious. For me, its all about playing the odds, and properly running my ABS and stability control equipped vehicle on true winter snow tires gives me a much better hand to play – all these things add up to make a significant difference in safety. Short of simply staying at home with my helmet on, this is how I improve my odds, but what I would really like is if everyone else also improves my and their odds by also using true snow tires in the winter.
I too think this is where gogogophers is getting confused. Michelin does offer a version of the tire that is rated as an ultra performance summer tire. However, I will bet dollars to donuts that what he has on his 2006 Civic are the A/S version of the tire.
The OP has a brand new BMW that very likely came with true Summer tires, and it is wise to not try to drive on them in the winter.
I could be wrong and gogogophers went out of his way to special order the summer version for a 10 year old car. I’ll admit that the car that I sometimes run summer tires on is also 10 years old, but it is a Mustang GT that has been modified for performance. I also park it under a car cover and on jack stands from roughly Thanksgiving until the spring.
It was certainly a big storm by any regard, and I can empathize with those who are suffering through something that doesn’t happen often. Our eye-rolling came from the earlier reports a bit further south where a few inches of snow appeared to stop all traffic, such as on I-75, where they were unprepared to handle freezing rain and ignored the importance of staying on top of snowfall instead of waiting for it to end to take care of it.
As others mentioned, summer tires are rare in Minnesota, and I’d say most people get by with all-season tires. I went to winter tires when I ended up in a house five miles from a city and wanted to be sure to be able to make it through a seven-inch snowfall. A 30-inch snowfall would be no-go until the plows get through, and around here the plows DO get through quite quickly, because it’s a normal occurrence (or at least not a once-in-a-generation thing). The biggest problem in most of Minnesota is the wide-open spaces in the country where it’s not necessarily the snow amounts, but the blowing snow that makes it impossible to see where you’re driving and even see if you’re on a road. That’s a problem no tire or 4WD can fix. It’s dangerous when the temperatures drop into the teens below zero, winds above 30 MPH and windchills below -40F, and you end up driving off the road. That’s when you need to stay home, regardless of tires.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned the buildup of frozen snow on low-profile wheels. An all-steel wheel will have a higher profile and help prevent that problem.
I was tempted today because there was not a cloud in the sky and the high was over 40. But I don’t think I have enough ground clearance to get down my street.
I guess the only thing we’ve missed is tire chains.
So here’s a vid with a bit of everything: tire chains, snow tires, a Wrangler with the top off, the weekend snow storm, boarding, and the Chairman of the Board singing the location: https://youtu.be/qRv7G7WpOoU .
See, this is where those of us who live “further south” get irritated by any eye-rolling whatsoever. I think people who live above a line across the US that runs basically across about 40*North latitude forget is the simple fact that winter weather events are rare “further south”.
It simply does not make sense for states and local municipalities to buy millions of dollars of snow removal and ice treatment supplies, only for those pieces of equipment to sit unused for 99% of the time.
Here in Atlanta, I bet the number of people that have an extra set of wheels mounted with winter tires sitting in their garage is less than 1% of the population. We received a dusting of snow in the storm last week, but it had evaporated by the next morning. As long as you could survive for about 12 hours at home (the horror!) you were fine. No need to have winter tires. No need for any road clearing equipment. I would rather my tax dollars go to repairing bridges and infrastructure that I use the other 99% of the time.
When I was one of thousands of motorists trapped on the interstates in the January 2014 Ice Storm that hit Atlanta. The storm tracked on amore northerly track than the NWS had predicted, and that was the difference between rain in south GA, and ice blanketing metro Atlanta. No one expected Atlanta to go from a cold drizzly day to a virtual ice skating rink in a matter of 2 hours. Millions of motorists were taken by surprise, myself included. And I grew up in the mountainous area of Virginia where winter weather was much more common.
So, let’s make a deal. We won’t roll our eyes at you guys and your substandard air conditioning, you don’t roll your eyes at our lack of snow removal equipment or winter tires.
A good ice storm will shut down the most prepared city, sometimes for extended periods, particularly if much of the power grid is brought down by ice.
What a lot of northerners don’t understand it that we get less freezing rain up here than folks to the south of us who are a little warmer on average. Snow is easy to deal with; freezing rain isn’t.
