I was sat in the office today trying to find some great tyre quotes for a customer who was asking for some good tyres. When I asked what was important to them or if they had any preference in brand or model, the response was vague and they didn’t know what brand was on their car at the time.
So where do we start to help this customer – what does make a ‘good’ tyre?
GRIP
A fair place to start. We want our tyres to grip. We don’t want to be going round a corner or roundabout, turning the steering wheel only to watch in horror as the car slides off the road. When we accelerate or brake, the car should speed up and slow down, not just spin and skid about like a puppy on a frozen pond. Grip is important in all conditions too. We want our tyres to grip in the cold and the wet as much as we do in the warm and dry.
The rainy UK provides quite a challenge, especially with the frequency of ‘flash flooding’ these days. Great lakes of water suddenly appearing on hard dry ground with nowhere for it to drain – our tyres need to be designed to cut through this surface water to find grip on the surface below instead of ski or ‘aqua-plane’ across the top of the water.
WEAR
Although we want lots of grip from our tyres, we don’t want this at the cost of poor tyre wear. If a tyre is made of soft, sticky rubber it might provide lots of grip on tarmac but equally the soft rubber will wear down very quickly and we’ll be needing to replace them all too soon.
This is why we see the different tyres in Formula One. Soft tyres for super fast laps but not too many of them on tracks that cut into the soft tyres and wear them down. Hard tyres for lots of laps without pitstops but not quite as grippy for super fast cornering..
At TyreQuote.com we definitely notice that customers using cheaper tyres are coming back more quickly to replace them than those buying more expensive branded tyres that last a bit longer, with lower levels of tyre wear.
NOISE
Whilst some drivers and motorists seem to favour lots of noise judging by their mammoth fuel guzzling engines and monsterous exhaust pipes, there are others that like to enjoy a quieter ride. With electric and hybrid cars becoming more common and manufacturers working hard to keep the sound from their engines under the bonnet we are more and more finding general motoring a nice and quiet ride. If you have comfy air suspension to waft you over the bumps and lumps in the road then you can enjoy whispered conversation with your passengers even at 60mph.
However, believe it or not, this can be ruined by poorly designed or even just badly fitted tyres.
We’ve already decided we want tyres that grip and tyres that dont wear too quickly but if the pattern on the tyre is so harsh so as to give us grip, it could become incredibly noisy when it rolls and rattles along the rode. if the rubber is very hard and we have a very ‘low profile’ (not much rubber between our wheel and the road) tyre then equally we could be having a noisy journey again.
Compromise
So ideally we want a relatively smooth pattern on the tyre to keep it as round as possible and the lack of noise will also mean better aero dynamics, less drag and increased fuel efficiency. Perfect. Well almost – except as we reduce the pattern and hardness of the rubber, we lose our grip and tyre wear! D’oh!
So it’s not easy to find the perfect tyre. Like many things in life, it’s all about compromise. More grip, more tyre wear. Less grip, less tyre wear. More grip, more noise.. and it goes on.
It really comes down to what sort of driving do you so. If you have a 4×4 and actually go off road more than up on to the school curb then you will want more grip and probably wont mind the extra noise as you are merrily chewing up hills. If you potter around town at 30mph most of the time, then who needs lots of grip? Just find something hard wearing and with low noise and fuel efficient.
Do you live in the Scottish highlands or Yorkshire moors and have early starts up your steep cobbled drive? Okay, a little specific here but seriously think about winter tyres for the winter – you will get even more grip, especially on the snow and ice. You might be better off with a 4 wheel drive car than a rear wheel drive car too then you can benefit from the grip of all 4 tyres, not just the 2 spinning away at the back!
When you are looking for great quotes for tyres on TyreQuote.com make sure you look at our reviews of the tyres you think you want. Do they have the right levels of grip, tyre wear, noise and fuel efficiency for your driving?
Thanks for reading,
James