Bridgestone Turanza ER300 (Bridgestone)

Member Name: Courant

Product:	Bridgestone
Date:	03/11/06 (13888 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great touring tyre: excellent grip in wet & dry, low wear

Disadvantages: Not very good when pushed hard

Bridgestone's Turanza ER300 tyres are billed as a premium "touring" tyre. I take touring to mean that the tyres should have enough grip to cope with a powerful car yet have enough features to appeal to the high mileage driver - low noise, low wear rate - rather than the out and out performance driver. Judged by these criteria, they've done a damn good job and these are excellent touring tyres!!!

I've had these in size 185/60R14H on my car (Honda Civic VTEC Coupe) for the past 28,000 miles. Needless to say, the wear rate is excellent as I'm a pretty hard driver and my daily commute for the past year has been on twisty back roads. I'd expect a a more conservative driver to get well in excess of 30,000 miles out of these. Noise levels are low and the tyres make for a very comfortable drive.

Now onto the outstanding feature of these tyres... Grip in the dry is really very good. Not quite as good as some performance tryes I've driven but almost up there and certainly more than good enough. In the dry I found it impossible to spin the wheels and ABS came on rarely. Wet grip can only be described as staggering. You do get some drop-off in the wet from the dry, but relatively the overal levels of grip are excellent - far better than some "performance" tyres. Driving in heavy rain is no problems - I never felt like I was approaching aquaplaning at any time, and grip in bends and under braking is confidence inspiring. Full marks, Bridgestone!

Given the great levels of grip, you might wonder why these are billed as touring rather than performance tyres? Well, two reasons really. The first is to do with cornering stability and steering response - the tyres, when pushed hard into a corner, feel like they wobble a little bit. You have to work a bit to find your line and the response isn't that good. Then, the way the tyres behave when approaching grip limits is, ahem, not very pleasant! Lots of "scrabbling", slip-stick and general discomfort. And when they go, they really go and you know about it. No nice and progressive loss of grip, these tyres really tell you when they've had it! So, despite the high levels of grip, these aren't tyres that you feel really confortable pushing that hard.

If you're in the market for a touring tyre, you're probably not the kind of driver who's going to push things hard and you can almost completely disregard the previous paragraph because the overally levels of grip available with these tyres means you'll never approach any limits. In which case, these tyres are suberb touring tyres: lots of grip, good wear, low noise and very confortable ride. You'd be very hard pushed to get any better!

If you're after a tyre you can push a bit harder, maybe these might be right for you but I think you can get better elsewhere.

Summary: Bridgestone Turanza ER300 tyre - excellent touring tyre with particularly good wet grip

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