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Continental ContiPremiumContact 2 Car Tyres
by markos9 Car tyres are boring, right? Well, perhaps. I always thought so until someone pointed out, soon after I started driving, that the only thing keeping my car between the white lines on the motorway at 70mph were four postcard sized pieces of rubber (the contact patches the tyres make with the road). Car tyres must work in very ... cold to hot temperatures, at high speeds, as well as wet and icy conditions. The tyre must grip well, yet wear slowly enough to ensure thousands of miles of life. They must also be damage resistant so that the various sharp objects they encounter do not cause the tyre to deflate. Anyone going to buy new tyres will see that there's a vast difference in price from the budget to the premium products. Knowing what I know about what tyres have to do, I always ensure that I buy a good tyre for my car. I also replace them before the legal limit (1.6mm) is reached, as at the legal minimum tread, the tyres will be barely adequate in wet conditions. When my latest tyres needed replacing (just over 2mm tread left), I found that the existing make was no longer available, but that an improved tyre was on the market. I bought two new front tyres (Continental Premium Contact 2), from etyres.co.uk (highly recommended, by the way) and got them fitted at home for an all in price of £64.90 each. I have now travelled eight thousand miles on my tyres, so have significant experience in their use. This is a quiet tyre; road noise is well controlled and not intrusive at all. Set at the recommended pressure (tip: always check your tyre pressure after new ones have been fitted, the fitter may have made a mistake), the ride is very comfortable even on the rough Cheshire roads they're subjected to every day. Road holding is very good. When cornering hard in the dry, the tyres give excellent grip, keeping the car in contact with the road. I've had to brake suddenly several times, the car stops quickly without sliding (and without the ABS on my car kicking in, indicating that the tyre has not lost traction). In wet conditions, this tyre gives real confidence in its grip. I've driven through relatively deep water at motorway speeds, with no sign of aquaplaning evident at all. When driving off, the traction can be defeated, but is still quite high. At no time, driving in the wet, at appropriate speeds, have I been worried that the tyre will let me down. I have even tested the tyre on ice (I hate driving in these conditions). My driveway is on a slope; the previous tyres would not grip well at all. These tyres give more grip than other tyres I've used, enabling me to get on my drive without 'fish tailing'. With the tyre having good grip, I expected the wear to be high (reasoning that soft rubber = good grip = excessive wear), but I've been proven wrong. After 8000 miles, there's much more than half of the original tread left; I estimate a life of around 18,000 - 20,000 miles on the front of my car (it's a front wheel drive model, the tyres will last a lot longer on the back). This is a mid to high priced tyre. Etyres.co.uk had budget tyres available from £49 for my car. I think that buying such cheap tyres is a false economy and possibly dangerous. It's important that those four postcard sized patches of rubber are as good as they can be. The Continental Premium Contact 2 is an excellent performer and can be highly recommended. Read the complete review |
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Pirelli Tyres
by Alfettaman I should say straight away that this is a relatively technical overview of the Pirelli Eufori run-flat tyre, based on my own personal experiences. 'Run-flat" technology: These 205/45x17 tyres came as standard equipment on my BMW MINI Cooper S, and - on paper at least - have quite a bit going for them. In essence, ... Euforis have extra rigid sidewalls which mean that they can support the weight of your car even when fully deflated. Pirelli market this as a safety feature, and BMW use it as an excuse not to supply a spare wheel - not even one of the skinny 'space-savers' that many manufacturers now use. The reality of all of this is actually rather different. It's true that a punctured car tyre is an inconvenience and can - in some circumstances - be dangerous too, so let's tackle the safety issue first. In a bygone era, car tyres had inner tubes and a puncturing object (say, a nail) would pierce the tyre then pop the tube, a bit like a pin in a balloon. The result could be a very sudden and catastrophic 'blow-out' and, at high speed, the car could veer violently and uncontrollably towards the punctured side. Modern cars use tubeless tyres, and the puncturing object usually stays in the tyre causing a much more gradual deflation: even if it comes out, the air escapes through a relatively small hole, rather than through a shredded inner tube. So punctures nowadays are unlikely to be the terrifying prospect that they were fifty years ago. Which leaves us with 'convenience'. Changing a tyre at the side of a rain-swept dual carriageway is certainly no fun, so the appeal of the run-flat technology is pretty obvious: but modern tyres are commendably puncture-proof and I've driven almost a million miles without ever having to change a wheel at the side of the road. That said, if Pirelli can offer the convenience of run-flat technology without any downsides, then of course I'll have it. Trouble is, there is a big downside - several, in fact. A compromised design: A car tyre works by pressing a small patch of rubber onto the road, which then resists the forces of steering, braking and acceleration, all of which are trying to make the tyre slip. The cars springs, dampers and flexibly-walled tyres are all designed to assist in keeping the tyre on the road, as otherwise it can't do its job: this is what engineers call 'compliance' - making the tyre tread 'comply' to the undulations and contours of the road. Pirelli have accepted a huge performance compromise with the Eufori, because the extra-stiff sidewalls play a much more limited part in keeping the rubber patch uniformly pressed against the road. Think what would happen if you put solid rubber tyres on a racing bicycle and rode it fast around bumpy corners, and you'll start to understand the problem: less grip, especially on wet, uneven or undulating surfaces, and a harsh and uncomfortable ride. Handling: Another issue with these run-flat tyres is the day-to-day handling. The designers have tried to ameliorate the problem of the very stiff sidewalls by making the tread blocks relatively soft and 'squishy' - essentially putting back a little bit of that missing compliance. Unfortunately though, the tread blocks squish sideways as well as up and down which robs the car's steering of all its feel and immediacy. This is particularly noticeable during the initial turn-in to a corner, as the soft tread resists the steering's order to turn. It makes the car feel as though the steering wheel has been fixed to the column using a block of rubber and also makes the Euforis 'tramline' quite badly as they are deflected by the grooves worn in the road: this is memorably bad once the tyres are more than half worn. Any 'press-ahead' driver will find these handling characteristics deeply frustrating and at times unnerving, because it makes the car's behaviour less predictable. An inconvenient convenience: There are yet more reasons to avoid these tyres: Pirelli say that you can only drive about 90 miles on a punctured Eufori, and then only at 50 mph. They also recommend that you fit it only to vehicles with a tyre pressure monitoring system (because you need to know when they're punctured, and drive accordingly), and a Eufori that's been run whilst flat has to be discarded as it cannot be repaired. In 40,000 miles of driving on Pirelli Euforis I had two puntures: perhaps an ironic consequence of the soft tread. In contrast, a conventional radial ply tyre can often be safely repaired if cleanly punctured near the centre of its tread. Since there is specialist equipment needed to fit run-flat tyres (not all tyre dealers have a suitable machine) and only a limited number of cars that use them, you could have trouble getting your tyres replaced at short notice. Sum-up: I finally gave up on these tyres when I had to discard two half-worn Euforis that were less than six months old, in order to get my (then) three year old MINI through its first MOT test. I was horrified when the test technician showed me that the tread on each rear tyre had split down the middle and round the entire circumference, virtually dividing the tyre into a left and right half. Not an easy fault to spot (there was lots of tread left on these tyres and superficially they looked fine) so I remain exceptionally grateful to that MOT tester for his skill and diligence. As if all this wasn't enough, the Euforis cost about £120 each. I now use Falken's excellent ZIEX 512 (it's now called 912) which provide loads of grip, compliance and comfort for £72 per tyre and outperform the Pirellis in almost every way. I've also made a one-off purchase of a tyre inflation kit for £25 which has a bottle of tyre sealant and a mini air compressor, just in case I get a puncture one day. Read the complete review |
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Continental
by Japmr2 I have Continental Sport Contact 3 tyres fitted to my Skoda Octavia VRS, and I am going to change them for a different brand once they wear out. They come with the above car as the standard tyre and cost around £100 to replace on a 205/45/R17. Dry weather grip: In the dry the amount of grip availble is impressive, my car has ... 225hp going through the front weels and these tyres can cope with that allowing zero amount of wheel spin. Wet weather grip: Their performance is just as good in the wet due to the design and layout of the tread which very efficiently expels the surface water away from the contact patch of the tyre. Road feedback: Fairly predictable but not as good as some of the other equivalent tyres on the market like the Goodyears, Dunlops and Bridgestones, as there is a bit too much flex in the sidewall of the tyre. Noise: The amount of road noise from this tyre is shocking. Its even worse when travelling at speed on the Motorway. Tyre wear: Is very very poor, they last only half as long as you would expect mainly due to their soft compound. Mine only lasted 6000 miles! This is mainly the reason I am changing tyre brand. I won't fit these again as there are other tyres out there that offer the same performance in the wet and dry conditions are a bit less noisy and last a bit lot longer for less money. I would recommend the Toyo TR1 instead. Read the complete review |
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