'Budget tyres' as opposed to pricier ones?

Joe_Horner

jase1 wrote: »

... yet no-one ever considers a car to be a "ditchfinder"

My '66 Daf is in a good cross-wind, but that's ok - it just helps to sharpen reaction times

Stops well, though - even on cheap rubber - and cuts through puddles like they're not even there. Mind you, it only has to shift a few teaspoons of water with it's 135 section tyres

kk20

I have 3 cars, a focus, SMAX and a classic lotus elan. The focus is my car, I put budget cheaply researched tyres on it. I am a confident "OAP" style driver and know the difference between hooning and an emergency stop. Currently my focus has Lexani LX-7's on it. They are a budget tyre made by nexen. Decent wear, not too bad in the wet.

The SMAX is driven by the wife and predominantly has children in it. I use kumho ecstas on it. Very good tyres in the wet, they wear slightly easier but are cheaper than main brands so it works out better.

The elan gets whatever I find as it is driven pretty lightly. It has some Avons on it because they look nice.

I too look at wet performance (vs wear). I have also used goodride SV308 (the sa05 are rubbish) an excellent tyre for the SMAX plenty of grip but wear very very fast. 8000miles on the front as opposed to 16k with michelins and 14k with kumho's. That being said, the goodrides were about £60 each fitted, the kumho £110 and michelins £180 (225/50/17 XL so not cheap)

It should also be noted about wear. I change at 3mm. The legal is 1.6mm but I consider that bald. Sure in the dry 1.6 is probably fine.

AlexisV

It depends what your driving habits are. If you just tootle around town and have something like a Nissan Note, it's not going to drive itself into a ditch just because you don't have premium tyres on it.

GolfBravo

jase1 wrote: »

Better than the Pirelli P7 in the wet -- a tyre that Ford fit to the Focus in the factory. Indeed, better than all the other tyres bar the Conti Contact 5.

There is no Pirelli P7 in that comparison. Their test includes Pirelli Cinturato P7 - Pirelli's eco tyre, which is obviously made of harder compound which doesn't perform well in wet. Nexen 8000 is not an eco tyre, it is a soft compound performance tyre. In fact ADAC's comments are: good in wet, high fuel consumption, highest wear.

I have a short Nexen story for you below.*

mikey72 wrote: »

I don't know how much to make of these tests though, if you look at the Uniroyal Rainexpert, a popular wet tyre
/snip/

You wouldn't buy it based on the last test, the Hankook and Kumho outperform it.
I would have no problems if it came on a car I bought though.

RainExpert and RainSport are two completely different tyres again. RainExpert is a summer touring tyre, RainSport is a performance tyre. Touring tyres should be well balanced and perform relatively well in all areas (dry, wet, noise, wear, handling), performance shuld excel in dry and wet grip/handling and are not expected to last very long , and eco tyres should mainly offer low rolling resistance and good wear qualities.

I looked very closely at RainExpert last month when I had to replace my tyres - it is a relatively well balanced tyre, good value for money. No nasty surprises there (eg. high wear, noise, etc.).

jase1 wrote: »

I consider wet grip and only wet grip when I am looking at these tyre reviews. Dry grip isn't something I see as a problem with any tyre, and noise/comfort/wear rate etc are subjective.

I don't have a problem with Energys but by the narrow criteria I set, they fall behind the best in the price range.

I didn't mean this to imply that they're ditchfinders

In ADAC tests noise/comfort/wear are not subjective - all three can be easily measured. The only two tyre parameters that I think can be subjective to buyers are their looks (whether you like the look of the thread pattern) and price (whether you consider the price high or low).

Michelin Energy have been around for ages (same with Primacy HP) - it is still relatively good well balanced tyre, but there are some really good new tyres available that perform marginally better.


* About ten years ago I had the opportunity to work very closely with people in charge of tyre evaluation at General Motors. It was around the time when Daewoo went bankrupt and GM were getting ready to re-launch Daewoo globally as Chevrolet and Holden.

We had over a dozen Daewoos available, four sets of tyres per day for each car. Not surprisingly the cars weren't particularly great to drive (except for Daewoo Kalos, which was just awful to drive - I can't believe they tried to sell it in the US as Pontiac G3). We quickly established that the main culprit were the tyres made by Kumho and Hankook. As soon as we put a set of decent Bridgestones on the cars were transformed (except for the Kalos POS).

We also tested some Nexens - they were the worst tyre by far, and the main problem was lack of consistency. You took a car on a handling performance track (Lang Lang proving ground, 100km south east of Melbourne), and after a few hot laps one or two tyres would develop serious problems (thread separation, chunks of rubber falling off, etc.). We just couldn't comprehend how two identical tyres can differ so much in quality. Then we discovered that Siemens-VDO engineers (also working with GM on ex-Daewoo cars) had the same quality issues across all electrical components - lack of consistent quality. As it turned out, in Korea and East Asia, when it comes to manufacturing they simply don't understand the concept of a reject. Car components that other manufacturers would quickly reject were simply OK'd as good enough, with the worst culprits sold to third parties (eg. wholesalers) at lower prices.

Kumho and Hankook have come a very long way over the years and they are by far the most decent Korean tyres. Nexen? Don't bother, they have years of catching up to do.