Thanks much guys, I will check them out. The alignment was way off on my car when I bought it and only a year later my passenger side tires are real worn on the insides, so I guess I have an excuse to buy new ones early.

 

Just so you are aware, the Nokian WRG3 is the only "all weather" tire besides the Vredestein Quatrac3 that is sold in the US that is rated for severe winter weather due to its design.


You can tell a tire is rated for this type of weather by the mountain snowflake symbol on the side of the tire.


And again, the pro of this tire is you can drive it during the summer but still have fantastic winter traction. This is the type of tire that europe considers an adequate 'all season'. Over there, people usually run something like this or have two sets of tires for each season.

 

I've never even heard of nokian tires, but I just started googling them and they look impressive. Kind of hard to find a tire place that has them, though. Do you have them on your G? Thoughts on them?

 

Yea, Nokian is a finnish brand. Really big in Europe. If you actually look back in history, they are the ones that invented the winter tires in the 1930s. The Hakkapelita Rs are usually rated at the top. Very good tire.

I don't have them on my G. We just put a set of the WRG2 SUV tires on my moms X5 and they are very impressive on that vehicle.

Some shops carry the Nordic style winter tire (Hakkapelita R) but a website I found them reasonably priced on was tiresbyweb.com

I currently run General Altimax Arctic on my car. These are actually produced by Gislaved tires which is a Swiss tire company, also very big in Europe.

Can you tell I am a bit of a tire nerd?

 

You should always use snow tires!!

I've compared my G37x with snow tires to a family member's Benz SUV with all-seasons.

My G outperforms the SUV in stopping, going, turning, etc.

 

Well the Twin Cities got dumped on today. I was happy with the performance of my G on all season tires. A little bit of sliding in the turns but I saw suv's doing the same. I really don't want to run two sets of wheels. Maybe if I find a cheap set for snows on Craig's list.

Much better than my FWD TL with Continental DWS tires. I'm running the stock Goodyear Eagle RSAs.

 

I get 500-550km in the city. Winter time i've dropped off to about 450-500km to a tank.

I'm impressed you get 630km to a tank, I can't even get anywhere close to that. I have a pretty heavy foot lol.

 

You can never go wrong with the Nokians. Those Finns know what they're doing. I drove on WRGs and WRG2s and could not be happier. Now I have the sexy Hakkapelliita R2s.

Check this out: Review: Nokian Hakkapeliitta R2

 

^ How are you liking the R2s? DiscountTire quoted me $800 installed for those vs. $690 for Blizzak WS-70s. Think it's worth the extra $110?

 

For $110 I would go with the R2. It is rated number 1 in the class and all I ever hear is nothing but good about it.

 

I ordered some R2's, $750 shipped on ebay. I think discount quoted me for a different tire because when I went to order them today, suddenly they wanted $233 a tire + install for a grand total of $1080.

 

Yeah i was suprised to...during the aug/sept months when i picked up the car i was loving that i was hitting 630 on a tank. I do a mix of highway and city driving.

 

what size tires did you with?

 

Just the ones for my stock Rims - 225 / 55 / 17

 

Last year the G did superbly without snows. This year, my backup plan is a Subie.

However, my area, except in 95 and 96 or the Christmas day or Halloween day storms, does not get the amount of snow as some of you and AWD is perfectly fine. Most of the Gs on the road are AWD. In fact, most of the cars in my neck of the woods are AWD.