i am buying winter tires in august for a car i do not own yet, and i would like somebody to tell me whether that is as stupid as it sounds.
Burlington. last november i went looking for winters in the common 17 inch sizes on the 14th and every shop in Chittenden County was two weeks out on both tires and labor. i am not doing that again. i am close to buying an all wheel drive crossover and it will be either a RAV4 or a Forester, which puts me at 225/60R18 or 225/60R17 depending which one i land on.
what i want to know, in order.
does all wheel drive change the winter tire answer at all? i am fairly sure i know the answer and i want to hear it from people who drive in it.
steel wheels or a used set of alloys for the second set? and if i go that route, do i need TPMS sensors in them or do i drive all winter with a light on the dash?
is dropping from an 18 to a 17 worth doing? the tires are cheaper and the sidewall is taller, which i am told matters on a frost heave.
and studs. Vermont's rules are on the state DMV site and i can read a page, but what i want is whether anybody here actually runs them and in what situation.
buying them in august is the opposite of stupid, it is the thing i tell customers in Maine every september and almost nobody does it.
all wheel drive gets you moving. it does nothing for stopping and almost nothing for turning, both of which are tires. the cars i winch out of ditches on the Portland side are overwhelmingly all wheel drive cars on worn all seasons, driven by people who learned over three or four snowfalls that the car always goes, and then found out in january what it does not do. you already know this. hear it anyway.
second set of wheels, and steel is fine. you pay for them once and then every november and april is a 20 minute wheel swap instead of unmounting and remounting four tires twice a year, which is 80 to 140 dollars a year and is harder on the tire beads. you do need sensors in the winter set on a car that has them, or you drive with a light on, and the cheap aftermarket sensors need programming to the car. have the shop that sells you the wheels do it and get it in writing that the light is off when you leave.
minus one is worth it. 17s on a crossover that came with 18s gives you a cheaper tire, more sidewall over a pothole, and a little more tread squirm, which nobody notices in february. check the brake clearance for the specific car before you buy wheels, it is almost never a problem on these but it is embarrassing when it is.
studs: i run studless. i would consider studs if i lived at the top of an unpaved hill with ice on it half the winter, and otherwise a modern studless winter tire is better on everything except glare ice and quieter on all of it.
i have no business in this thread. i live in Mobile and i have seen snow four times in my life, twice of them on television.
one useful thing though. i bought winter tires exactly once, for a job that put me in Rochester Minnesota for two winters, and what got me was the mounting. two swaps a year on one set of wheels, at 35 dollars a swap plus balancing, and by the third year i had paid for steel wheels twice over and worn the tires faster doing it. get the second set of wheels. it is not a luxury, it pays for itself in about three seasons and you can swap them in your own driveway with a floor jack if you ever want to.
two things off the estimate desk, since this comes through my shop forty times every october.
people put four winter tires on and skip the alignment, and then the winter set wears on one shoulder and they blame the tire. if the car is new to you and you do not know its history, get the alignment checked before you mount a fresh set of anything.
and when you buy wheels, buy for your actual car, not for the brand. offset, bolt pattern and center bore, all three. the universal wheels with the ring kits work until the ring moves and you get a vibration at 60 that nobody can find. a RAV4 and a Forester do not share wheels, so wait until you know which car you have before you buy the wheels, even if you buy the tires now.
Bend, so we get snow and a lot of ice on the way to the trailheads, and our road is gravel and shaded.
i ran studs one winter on the gravel road and they were good on the ice at the bottom of our driveway and noisy and vague everywhere else. went back to studless and i am not going back again. the one place i would still want them is if i were driving a steep unpaved hill every day, the way ivan said.
worth noting that every state writes its own rules on studs, including date windows for when they are legal, so read your own state's page rather than ours. Oregon has a season. Vermont is not Oregon.
ordered. 225/60R17 Blizzak WS90s, four of them, with 17 by 7 steel wheels and TPMS sensors programmed, 1,088 dollars out the door from a shop in Williston. they are holding them in the back until i have a car to bolt them to, which the guy at the counter said happens more often than you would think.
i read the state page and studs are allowed here, no season window the way Oregon has one. i am going studless anyway on the strength of this thread, and because my street gets plowed.
priya's point stopped me from ordering wheels in august, which is why the order is tires plus wheels held rather than wheels in my garage. if i end up with a RAV4 the 17 inch steels fit, if it is the Forester the bolt pattern is different and the shop swaps the order. i got that in an email, not a handshake.
i do not need winter tires in Louisville, i buy them anyway because of two trips a year to see my daughter in Ann Arbor, and i want to flag the one thing in your last post that other people should copy.
getting the swap in writing before the tires are mounted. once a tire has been on a wheel it is used and nobody is swapping your order. unmounted and in the back room, almost any shop will trade a size or a bolt pattern for you. that is a two sentence email that is worth a few hundred dollars, and most people would have done it on a handshake and then eaten the difference.
