If you don’t pay attention to your tires you’re not paying attention to your safety. Your tires are the only 4 points that connect you to the ground during all 4 seasons. Now you might be wondering, what kind of tires do I have on my car right now? I thought all tires were the same?!
Let’s start out with the most common type of tire, the all season tire. These tires allow you to drive during all seasons as the name implies. They’re made of rubber compounds that aren’t very hard or very soft, and so they remain pliable and grippy year round. You want your tire to stick to the ground and provide as much traction as possible. You never have to change all season tires so they’re super convenient.
Now let’s talk about winter tires, winter tires are made of a very soft rubber, as the temperature lowers, they don’t harden as much as all season tires or summer tires so they remain pliable and grippy when the temperature drops.
The last type of tire is a summer tire, summer tires perform best during high temperatures and are quite grippy during hot conditions. If you try to use summer tires during the winter they’ll harden up even moreso than all-seasons and you might as well have plastic tires on. If there’s any amount of snow on the ground, you’ll end up not being able to move your tire even on flat ground. So if your tire
Your tires are the only 4 points that connect you to the ground during all 4 seasons.
Now you might be asking, why can’t I just use winter tires during all seasons? Well the problem with that is during the summer, your winter tires will wear out extremely fast. As you remember, winter tires are made of rubber that stays very grippy in cold weather, and cold weather makes rubber much harder. So your tires will actually end up wearing out very quickly in the heat.
So what’s the verdict? If you can, use both summer and winter tires and change them out in the spring and the fall. But if you just want convenience, use all seasons and make sure you change those out regularly when the tread wears out.