Tiger Woods has seen a dip in the number of his product endorsements. In an effort to take up the slack, I thought I'd pass along my opinions on a product I've been impressed with.Noreen and I are spending much more time at the cottage in the winter than we anticipated. We're up here almost as often as we are in the summer. Between ice fishing, snowshoeing and -- OK, we admit it -- laying around reading and knitting, we find a visit to the north country to be a perfect antidote to the pressures of our city jobs.
One thing that's NOT very relaxing up here in the winter is the roads. They can be a bit scary at times, especially County Road 459, which we take for the final eight miles to the cottage. It occasionally resembles a cross between a cross country ski trail and a luge run.
We can't really blame the various governments up here too much because they're poor as church mice and don't have the resources to maintain the roads like they should. Bottom line is that we've had some interesting driving up here.
Last week we were watching some videos online that showed impressive performance differences on snow and ice between all-season tires and winter tires. We thought "Let's give 'em a try."
I researched winter tires and found that they had changed a great deal from the "snow tires" of my youth. Back then the vast majority of American cars were rear-wheel-drive and folks just put honking big tires with deep, aggressive treads on the rear wheels.
Today's winter tires are not noticeable unless you look close. They have a much more "normal" looking tread and are always put on all four wheels. They also tend to perform fairly normally on warm dry pavement, unlike their predecessors.
We ended up buying Michelin X-Ice Xi2 tires and a set of four wheels to make them easier to swap out. I had already been leaning toward them when a friend with a Consumer Reports membership offered to check their Web site and, lo and behold, they were top rated.
The bad qualities of old snow tires were:
- Noisy. Often at freeway speeds you couldn't even hold a conversation.
- Poor tread life. The relatively soft rubber compound wore very quickly.
- Lousy fuel economy. You might pay a penalty of 20% or more in fuel consumption. Not such a big deal back when gas was 89 cents a gallon, but would be painful now!
Noreen and I drove the 220 miles up here from Detroit at speeds generally between 70 and 80 miles per hour and had no problem holding a normal conversation. We both agreed that if there was any increase in sound level it was minor. Problem number one solved.
We have one of those fuel economy gauges on the dash that we both take with a grain of salt. Of course the manufacturer wants you to believe that you're getting good fuel economy. But the RELATIVE number only dropped one mpg, and we've often seen variations based on a strong headwind, lots of stop and go, etc. Also, when you've made the trip as many times as we have you have a very good sense of how much fuel it takes. The one mile per gallon number looks realistic to us. That would translate into a 4% penalty with the new tires. Not bad. Problem number two addressed.
Tread life remains to be seen and perhaps I'll offer an update at the end of the season. Michelin brags that they're using a new silica-based (?!?!) tire compound that allows a soft winter compound with 75% less wear than their nearest competitor. We'll see.
"What about the performance on snow and ice, dumbbell!" you might ask, and rightfully so. That's the whole point of the exercise, right? So far I've been very impressed. Although the roads up here this weekend don't rank with the worst we've seen, they're spooky enough. We had a day of rain up here this past week, followed by a rapid temperature drop, followed by snow and high winds. The roads are basically glare ice with a thin coating of powdery snow on top. The tires have acquitted themselves quite well with the ABS going on very infrequently and no loss of adhesion in the curves.
All in all, the tires are doing the job they're supposed to do and we feel safer in poor winter driving conditions.
