Given the recent very cold snap in Britain it is interesting to see how different cars are coping with the weather. The small car I use for commuting to work, a Toyota Yaris, has been coping quite well. I've had a few problems with the washer jets icing over but, aside from that, it has stayed quite firmly planted to the road - even when the roads have been snowed over or caked in ice. Like most people in Britain I don't have fully fledged winter tyres on my car - it has EcoContact3 tyres which are meant to reduce rolling resistance but they have done well considering the conditions they have been used in. Others have not fared so well and I've seen a few cars well and truly stuck.
Having browsed the Toyota owners forum it looks like others are finding mixed results. Obviously those with winter or off-road tyres have been OK but amongst Yaris owners it seems to be those that have opted for big alloy wheels and fat tyres that have come unstuck. A Rav-4 owner appears to have discovered that 4 wheel drive is useless when you can't get grip on even one tyre. Surprisingly, Prius owners have been doing well. They have low rolling resistance tyres fitted as standard and these tyres, in common with the winter tyres, have one magic component that may well make the difference: silica. Silica was introduced to tyres to improve wet road grip, reduce rolling resistance and, importantly, to improve the elasticity of tyres in cold winter conditions. It also makes tyres more expensive to manufacture, which is why the likes of Michelins cost so much (aside from supporting their huge marketing and R&D budgets).
The problem is, that when choosing a replacement tyre there is very little information to go on. The best independent reviews of tyres are published by motoring organisations such as Germany's ADAC but this is going to change in the next couple of years. Late last year, the EU agreed to introduce a standard tyre labelling system - similar to the efficiency stickers which are placed on new washing machines and refrigerators. The information will provide a comparative guide on the tyres' rolling resistance, noise and grip in the wet. The last is import
ant and was added at the insistence of Continental Tyres who were concerned that their products may be undercut by budget tyres produced with a hard-as-Hell rubber compound, to reduce rolling resistance, but with all the road-holding properties of Teflon.
I think this is a major step forward although I do have some misgivings on how the standardised tests are to be conducted, as the standard fuel economy tests for cars have come to have little bearing on how well the vehicles will perform in real-world driving. Once the manufacturers worked out how to tune the vehicles purely for the rolling road test, that's what they did - any improvement in the real world is just a by-product. I think that rigging the tyre tests will prove a little more difficult but I haven't found out exactly how these will be done. I'm assuming that the tyres will have a standard inflation, load and ambient temperature. However, from what I can gather, this will be done at 20 degrees Celsius. It would be far more enlightening if this was also done at, say, 1 degree. This would then show the various benefits and weaknesses of summer, winter and all-season tyres.
As for Britain, I'm interested to see if the sales of Winter tyres take off next year - it's actually quite hard even to find them on sale at the moment. Certainly, many people have been caught out by the cold snap but I suspect that memories will have quietly forgotten that by next November. If Britain had the same climate as Bavaria I don't think it would be an issue but as our climate is so predictably unpredictable I think it would take a good bit of convincing to fork out £500 for some seasonal wheels.
Having browsed the Toyota owners forum it looks like others are finding mixed results. Obviously those with winter or off-road tyres have been OK but amongst Yaris owners it seems to be those that have opted for big alloy wheels and fat tyres that have come unstuck. A Rav-4 owner appears to have discovered that 4 wheel drive is useless when you can't get grip on even one tyre. Surprisingly, Prius owners have been doing well. They have low rolling resistance tyres fitted as standard and these tyres, in common with the winter tyres, have one magic component that may well make the difference: silica. Silica was introduced to tyres to improve wet road grip, reduce rolling resistance and, importantly, to improve the elasticity of tyres in cold winter conditions. It also makes tyres more expensive to manufacture, which is why the likes of Michelins cost so much (aside from supporting their huge marketing and R&D budgets).
The problem is, that when choosing a replacement tyre there is very little information to go on. The best independent reviews of tyres are published by motoring organisations such as Germany's ADAC but this is going to change in the next couple of years. Late last year, the EU agreed to introduce a standard tyre labelling system - similar to the efficiency stickers which are placed on new washing machines and refrigerators. The information will provide a comparative guide on the tyres' rolling resistance, noise and grip in the wet. The last is import
ant and was added at the insistence of Continental Tyres who were concerned that their products may be undercut by budget tyres produced with a hard-as-Hell rubber compound, to reduce rolling resistance, but with all the road-holding properties of Teflon.I think this is a major step forward although I do have some misgivings on how the standardised tests are to be conducted, as the standard fuel economy tests for cars have come to have little bearing on how well the vehicles will perform in real-world driving. Once the manufacturers worked out how to tune the vehicles purely for the rolling road test, that's what they did - any improvement in the real world is just a by-product. I think that rigging the tyre tests will prove a little more difficult but I haven't found out exactly how these will be done. I'm assuming that the tyres will have a standard inflation, load and ambient temperature. However, from what I can gather, this will be done at 20 degrees Celsius. It would be far more enlightening if this was also done at, say, 1 degree. This would then show the various benefits and weaknesses of summer, winter and all-season tyres.
As for Britain, I'm interested to see if the sales of Winter tyres take off next year - it's actually quite hard even to find them on sale at the moment. Certainly, many people have been caught out by the cold snap but I suspect that memories will have quietly forgotten that by next November. If Britain had the same climate as Bavaria I don't think it would be an issue but as our climate is so predictably unpredictable I think it would take a good bit of convincing to fork out £500 for some seasonal wheels.
Ocado are fitting Winter Tyres to all of their vehicles but they had to import them from Scandanavia. They reckon it adds 9p to each delivery including the time taken to fit them and they should get a couple of years out of each set.
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