WINTER TIRES

Same thing here. Before you freak, $ in Cdn. I'm in Montreal, the Icy Road Capital.

With the dealer, Michelin 131$/ea and 15" Corola rims 70$/ea. Plastic caps extra. Cheapest winter tires were 115$ ea.

I went to an aftermarket tire/service company. Yokohama's at 78$/ea and rims at 55$/ea. Plastic hubcaps at 45$ for the set.

My previous four cars I used Yoko's, and I'm VERY satisfied with the Jap tires. I had them on my Toyota Tercel, Corola, Sienna.

I just love being to stop at stop signs, and taking off before the guy behinds me rear-ends me, and blazes on, sometimes doing a 180.

 

WS50's are good tires but the new Blizzak Revos are even better... check out the tests on tirerack.com. they have steel wheels this year for the Prius, too.

rpm

 

We live in Vermont, 2004 Prius with 60,000 miles on it, avid skiers (will drive through any conditions pretty much) ...gone through two winters already...the Nokian Hakkapellita 2 on steel wheels is our choice...bar none. Long treadlife, superb winter traction. Slightly noisy and not very sporty on dry pavement..but if you want a SNOW tire....Hakkapellitas are the way to go.

Probably the most popular snow tire on cars in Vermont. Just look around at any parking lot in the winter and check out the brand of tires on the cars with Vermont plates.

We love 'em and buy them for all our cars here.

 

Agree the WS-50s are great tires, I have them on my 7-series BMW and it handles great in snow - but they have newer ones now that I think are even better.

Just remember to take them off in March before the weather gets warm. If you drive on them when it is 70 degrees or higher you will chew them up in about 1,000 miles as they are very soft rubber.

 

I got the Michelin X-Ice last year and was very pleased with their ice and snow performance as well as their mileage performance.

I looked at the Blizzak, but simply could not be convinced that Bridgestone's practice of only providing the sticky ice-gripping compound in the top half of the tire tread and regular compound in the rest of the tire and then charging a premium price for the tire was a sound investment (pay 2x for 1/2 a tire?? I don't think so...). The usual argument given by Bridgestone supporters is that "once your tread is down 50% the snow tires need to be replaced anyways", is BS in my experience- back on my Corolla, I had Toyo Observes that I kept until nearly down to the wear bars because I kept procrastinating about replacing them, and because they used the same Microbit compound all the way through, the tires maintained a very acceptable level of performance- ice grip was still excellent, not much different than new, although there was a bit more wheel spin in loosely packed snow due to lack of tread depth, but all-in-all, still very good performance, and though worn, were many orders of magnitude better than even a brand new set of all-seasons (I was late changing the tires over that year- I had on a new set of Michelin Harmony tires that was only a few months old- these tires were great for dry and wet pavement, but useless on snow- I slid right through an intersection the day we got our first snowfall- and that was the night I swapped on the old worn Toyos which served me through yet another winter), so I know that a full-depth compound tire can maintain performance well past just 50% tread wear.

Indeed, I tend to view the Bridgestone tires as an accident waiting to happen because they're great when new, but rather than degrading gracefully like a tire that uses the same compound throughout the tread, all of a sudden, one day, all your ice grip is completely lost as you've worn the sticky stuff off and are into the normal compound.. Additionally, Bridgestone is no longer unique in their use of the soft porous "ice gripping" rubber- there are many other competitive tires that now use very similar compounds but use it for the entire depth of the tread as they should. Unfortunately, most of these tires (including the Toyos) are not available in a size/load rating that was suitable for my Classic Prius (otherwise I would have tried one of them or stuck with the Toyo Observes that I used on my Corolla; heck, even the Michelin X-ice were not available in the right load rating in OEM size, so I went with a taller profile tire (175/70R14) with a sufficient load rating which I determined were OK to be used on the car based on the available clearances for chains on OEM tires listed in the manual (ie, the larger tire was still smaller than the space required by OEM tires with permissible chains).