I've swapped on Winter tyres (fitted November until February) for decades. We stopped flying, to skiing, and have driven (French alps) once or twice a winter for at least 20 years. We've had a number of occasions where there was packed snow all the way from Moutier up to the resort. Gendarms pulling everyone over to get them to put chains on, wife leans out of window and says "Pneus Hiver" (that's as good as our French gets!) and they waved us on. Didn't care whether that was "That's good enough" or "Mad Brit, don't care"
but either way I have found winter tyres remarkable sure-footed.
One one such occasion we were in convoy with a Range Rover with chains. Whilst he made reasonably good progress, compared to other cars on chains, it was nothing like what we did with Pneus Hiver - and on that occasion it was a FWD Alhambra; doing it in the AWD MS is better still. We have always sailed past everyone else using chains going up the mountain, so my main reason for not using them is that you can't get on with it. Still have to be careful slowing down, but on the uphill leg, at least, gravity is helping and being able to overtake all the chain-slow-coaches saved us a lot of time. None of them can overtake at all, so all restricted to slowest vehicle in group.
There's always a lot of traffic heading for the resorts we use, so a fresh massive fall would be cleared in reasonable time, and then compressed by other traffic, so if it was such that we needed even more traction I think we would prefer to wait a few hours, rather than attempt it.
If you are new to Winter Tyres its like night-and-day compared to "others"
Majority of times we've been its been black tarmac, until in the resort ... but the Winters just mean you don't have to do chains for the last bit, or "getting around" if you decided to nip to an adjacent resort for the day and so on.
