Summer Report On Winter Tires: Nokian WRG3

[MrPinrel]

i installed four wrg3’s as a replacement for my stock 19” michelins on a 2013 s85. i was looking for better winter performance in kansas city. we don’t get snow often enough to put on snow tires but i was looking for something better especially since my car is rwd only.

overall i have been disappointed.

- snow performance is better but there hasn’t been that many snow days while i lived in KC, and then i ended up moving to florida so didn’t really get the benefit that i was originally looking for
- wet performance on heavy rain is very good, but i find traction is a lot worse when the roads are just a little bit wet
- traction on dry pavement is a lot worse, traction control comes on almost all the time on hard acceleration where with the michelin’s it almost never did.
- car is noticeably noisier

durability has been good but when the time comes to switch i would buy another brand, even if i was still living in KC.

 

[tander]

(LMB spouse)

There's been a lot of debate about winter tires on this forum. Many think the Nokian Hakka R2 is the best no-compromise snow tire, but of course it's not suitable for warm weather.

LMB and I live in south suburban Boston where the roads are usually cleared within 24 hours following a snowstorm. After reading all the discussions last year, we decided to replace the stock (early 2013 S85) 19 inch Goodyears with Nokian WRG3 so-called all weather tires. Our hope was that we could run these year round with reasonable performance in snow, rain, and hot weather.

We had the Watertown service center install these at the beginning of January (thanks Mat). Two weeks later, it started snowing and didn't stop much, setting a season record of 119 inches. The tires performed very well in varying snow conditions, including a day trip to New York city with heavy snow both ways. The only winter condition we didn't experience was glare ice, and performance was very good otherwise.

This spring, we did some driving in heavy rain with standing water and again, performance was very good, much better than the stock Goodyears.

Dry handling is also much better than the Goodyears (probably not saying much), with very little squirm during hard cornering. We do keep the tires at 48 psi except during multi-day hot weather road trips so this may be helping a bit.

Road noise is quiet on good surfaces, moderate on rough ones. So far we have about 10,000 miles on the tires and tread depth is down less than 1.5 millimeter (they've been rotated once). There has been no obvious loss of range on long trips either, suggesting that rolling resistance is pretty good.

To this point, the tires have lived up to our most optimistic expectations. We'll see how they do over several years, but I would highly recommend them for owners that need good but not ultimate winter performance in a year-round tire and don't want to have two sets of tires and rims.

Do you remember if you ever got them on black ice? Considering getting them again, but had them before on a rwd front engine car and they were basically unusable on black ice in that car, everywhere else they were a great compromise.

 

[jerry33]

Do you remember if you ever got them on black ice? Considering getting them again, but had them before on a rwd front engine car and they were basically unusable on black ice in that car, everywhere else they were a great compromise.

(Sorry if this is a dupe, but the original didn't show up) Where I live there is little snow but there are ice days where everything is covered with 6-8 mm of ice. Never had any issues with the RWD S. The noise isn't a factor around here because many of the highways have an aggregate size that makes any tire loud. However, the new X is much quieter than the 2013 S.

 

[tander]

(Sorry if this is a dupe, but the original didn't show up) Where I live there is little snow but there are ice days where everything is covered with 6-8 mm of ice. Never had any issues with the RWD S. The noise isn't a factor around here because many of the highways have an aggregate size that makes any tire loud. However, the new X is much quieter than the 2013 S.

Thx, just meant noise with regard to wrg3 versus humm of a proper snow tire.

 

[jerry33]

Thx, just meant noise with regard to wrg3 versus humm of a proper snow tire.

Where I live now, winter tires would just melt off in one season, so I don't have a comparison. I was comparing them to the standard Michelin Primacy. The Primacy is noticeably quieter when both are approaching end of life. When new, not much difference.