Quote:
Originally Posted by Efthreeoh
I live in central Virginia. It occasionally snows. I drive up to Northern Virginia (DC area) to go to work. I have a 4 wheel drive truck for real snow. But usually, because you can get stuck in DC traffic literally for hours during a DC snow storm, I just work from home when it snows.
Which explains why I use high performance all season tires on all my cars. It doesn't snow here enough nor deep enough to merit a dedicated set of snow tires. Summer tires are too soft to get decent mileage out of them. The loss of grip between summer tires and All Seasons is not that big of a gap for any type of street driving IMO. When I bought my Z4 Coupe in December 2014, it had Michelin Pilot Sport summer runflats on it. I drove the car all that winter and never noticed any sort of loss of control due to driving summer tires on cold pavement. My sport-package E90 came with Bridgestone REA050 summer tires. Bought in May 2006, I drove it all winter of 2006 and never lost control of the car nor had an accident because of some perceived (and unexpected) increase in braking distance. And I live rural with great driving roads starting just at the end of my driveway.
People who say driving summer tires in winter on cold pavement (not snow covered pavement) is like driving on ice skates is just utter bullshit. People who say driving on (high performance) All Seasons is a compromise is again, utter bullshit. Live in an area of the country where it is cold and snowy all the time, then sure winter tires make sense. But All Seasons hold their own in most winter situations and return better tread life than either winter tires or summer tires without much compromise in cold or warm weather grip.
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Thank you for this "real world, not repeating what somebody else told me " post. I live in NYC and have always driven my E46 M3, E60 M5 and F10 M5 on summers through the whole winter on dry days with no issues. Hell I ride my sport bike (ZX14) to work all year round and somehow have managed to survive with sport rubber.
Snow and ice are a different animal.