New shoes Canada style

Used Hakkas before and now the first snow with Blizzaks. To me the Blizzaks seem to grip better in wet snow than Hakkas.

 

We have a few inches of snow on the ground here today. Time to do some careful power, steering and brake induced traction losses in order to practice recovery.

Just need an empty parking lot...

 

Which Hakkas?

 

There was a pretty insightful article in the Red Star the other day by a guy who has done extensive winter tire testing, sounds like he puts more than 800 km into each evaluation. The summary is that there is not a perfect winter tire, only tradeoffs. You have to pick the tire based on what you find in your area. If you have a lot of ice conditions, you want a tire that has tons of siping. But sipes create a lot of road noise. Studs are even better than siping but they create even more road noise and have a slight effect on dry grip that's not beneficial.

I spoke to an engineer at Transport Canada who's involved in winter tire testing. He says that all tires with the 3-peak mountain symbol pass the test, so buy the cheapest ones because they'll all be better than an all-season tire. That said, the largest companies have the most money for R&D but there's a question of overpaying for a 5% gain.

I find that Norway and Sweden have excellent tire testing, and you can read the tests in translation on Google Translate. I just look for a tire that does well in the conditions I'm expecting most of the time, that's also reasonably priced. (Blizzaks are not doing too well in the Norway/Sweden tests right now.)

Sometimes I found bargains like when I figured out that Canadian Tire was selling General-branded tires that were actually the last-gen Nokian Nordfrost tires except half-price. They were the equivalent of Nordfrost 4, when the current Nokian model was the Nordfrost 5. They were amazing tires on my wife's Volvo.

Probably everyone reading this already knows, but I'll just write that any type of dedicated winter tire is going to stop your Taco way better than the popular KO2 or similar all-terrain tires. Sometimes if you can just stop six inches shorter you can avoid an accident altogether - difference between a KO2 and a Blizzak can be up to 27 feet in some conditions.

 

Just got my truck back from Kal Tire. Newly installed Nokian Hakkapeliita R3 SUV in stock size. Only 1lb heavier than the stock wranglers.

They do look ever so slightly smaller than the stock wranglers though.

Now to go find some snow!

 

Bring those Hakkas over to Ottawa, we've got LOTS of snow