(LMB spouse)
There's been a lot of debate about winter tires on this forum. Many think the Nokian Hakka R2 is the best no-compromise snow tire, but of course it's not suitable for warm weather.
LMB and I live in south suburban Boston where the roads are usually cleared within 24 hours following a snowstorm. After reading all the discussions last year, we decided to replace the stock (early 2013 S85) 19 inch Goodyears with Nokian WRG3 so-called all weather tires. Our hope was that we could run these year round with reasonable performance in snow, rain, and hot weather.
We had the Watertown service center install these at the beginning of January (thanks Mat). Two weeks later, it started snowing and didn't stop much, setting a season record of 119 inches. The tires performed very well in varying snow conditions, including a day trip to New York city with heavy snow both ways. The only winter condition we didn't experience was glare ice, and performance was very good otherwise.
This spring, we did some driving in heavy rain with standing water and again, performance was very good, much better than the stock Goodyears.
Dry handling is also much better than the Goodyears (probably not saying much), with very little squirm during hard cornering. We do keep the tires at 48 psi except during multi-day hot weather road trips so this may be helping a bit.
Road noise is quiet on good surfaces, moderate on rough ones. So far we have about 10,000 miles on the tires and tread depth is down less than 1.5 millimeter (they've been rotated once). There has been no obvious loss of range on long trips either, suggesting that rolling resistance is pretty good.
To this point, the tires have lived up to our most optimistic expectations. We'll see how they do over several years, but I would highly recommend them for owners that need good but not ultimate winter performance in a year-round tire and don't want to have two sets of tires and rims.
There's been a lot of debate about winter tires on this forum. Many think the Nokian Hakka R2 is the best no-compromise snow tire, but of course it's not suitable for warm weather.
LMB and I live in south suburban Boston where the roads are usually cleared within 24 hours following a snowstorm. After reading all the discussions last year, we decided to replace the stock (early 2013 S85) 19 inch Goodyears with Nokian WRG3 so-called all weather tires. Our hope was that we could run these year round with reasonable performance in snow, rain, and hot weather.
We had the Watertown service center install these at the beginning of January (thanks Mat). Two weeks later, it started snowing and didn't stop much, setting a season record of 119 inches. The tires performed very well in varying snow conditions, including a day trip to New York city with heavy snow both ways. The only winter condition we didn't experience was glare ice, and performance was very good otherwise.
This spring, we did some driving in heavy rain with standing water and again, performance was very good, much better than the stock Goodyears.
Dry handling is also much better than the Goodyears (probably not saying much), with very little squirm during hard cornering. We do keep the tires at 48 psi except during multi-day hot weather road trips so this may be helping a bit.
Road noise is quiet on good surfaces, moderate on rough ones. So far we have about 10,000 miles on the tires and tread depth is down less than 1.5 millimeter (they've been rotated once). There has been no obvious loss of range on long trips either, suggesting that rolling resistance is pretty good.
To this point, the tires have lived up to our most optimistic expectations. We'll see how they do over several years, but I would highly recommend them for owners that need good but not ultimate winter performance in a year-round tire and don't want to have two sets of tires and rims.
