GET YOUR DEDICATED SNOW TIRES NOW !!!

Bolshoi, as Tommy Smothers used to say.

Let's stop calling them "snow tires". They are "winter tires" and are just as if not more important on ice as they are on snow. I very often call them "ice tires" when speaking to others about winter tires.

We have far more days of icy roads than snowy roads. And there is often a layer of ice covered by a thin layer of snow.

DO NOT want to wait until it actually snows before installing winter tires. You want to do it before icy roads are possible.

The ice gripping compound in the tread the Blizzaks we use on all our vehicle is only in the top approximately 7/32 inch depending on the original tread depth. When the tread gets down to 5/32 inch they start functioning as traditional winter tires, i.e. no ice gripping compound. I replace Blizzaks when they get down to 5/32 inch of tread.

Here's a link to a Tire Rack video about tire performance on ice:

 

Regardless, but please don't tell people to use winter tires only on snow. Please might take your advice and get in trouble.

 

Our winter tires go on this coming weekend (Oct 26) since forecasted temperatures next week are in the 20's with precipitation that might mean icy roads. I don't have the option of staying at home when I get a call in the middle of the night informing me that someone is having a medical emergency.

 

I just put mine on. It's slightly early, but it's supposed to snow tomorrow, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. I'll probably need them by mid to late November anyway, so I wouldn't save that much by waiting.

I measured the tread and the Blizzaks have about 7/32 remaining on the fronts and 10/32 on the rears. That's with around 5000 miles on them, and they started at 11/32. At this rate they will all be at around 6/32 by the end of this season. Maybe I can get another season out of them, but it would be a stretch. I'm definitely not buying these again. The Prime in EV mode seems to be a tire shredding machine.

The factory all-seasons (mine came with Dunflops) have about 6/32-7/32 remaining with about 10,000 miles on them. According to tire rack they started at 8/32, so that's not terrible.

 

You may want to give a try with Xice next time. As I commented, my Xice XI3 was put on my PRIME last year for the first winter. I put ~5000 miles from Nov to Apr. It had 10.5/32 tread when new and after 1 winter on PRIME all four tires have 9.5/32 tread left. I have had two sets of Xi3 (the first set on my previous Gen3) both times with discounts and rebates, I got them ~$50/tire x4 = ~$200 total.

BTW, my PRIME also came with Dunlop Enasaver A/S as OEM. I had them for my first winter and they did OK when still newish with plenty of tread on them. I did not trust them for the second winter and I bought Xi3. I put back the Dunlop for the second year this spring, they now have total ~30K on them and 4/32 tread left on both front and back. I will be needing a new set of all-season next year.

 

Wow, they seem to be wearing at an alarming rate after only 5,000 miles. I wonder whats going on. You should put the best ones on the front to at least even out the wear and get better traction. The least I've gotten out of Blizzaks is 15,000 miles and that's on our tire-eater Sienna but at least all the many Blizzak sets have worn evenly with rotations.

Gosh I've done a massive amount of winter driving in Colorado ... was a complete ski nut for decades until I had a ski career ending crash I don't remember. Ruined a brand new helmet the first day I wore it. The Aspen Valley Hospital was nice they tell me. At least I can now tell people that my head injury is the reason for my sometimes questionable behavior!

 

I just checked my service records, and I have just 4278 miles on the Blizzaks so far. That's pretty terrible. I have the better ones on the front now to even it out. I guess that wasn't clear from my last post. The excessive wear happened on the front last season. I'm definitely getting X-Ice next time, unless anyone comes up with a better long-lasting snow tire.

I've had nothing but bad luck with Blizzaks. My girlfriend had a set that wore unevenly to the point where one was almost bald (down to the 2/32 summer wear bar). That may be a result of the tire shop replacing only one tire on her AWD Subaru for some reason.

I also bought a set used for my SUV. I mostly just wanted the wheels they were on, but it was a fairly good deal. The guy I bought them from has a Tacoma, and one of the tires was down to 9/32 while another was at 16/32, and the other two were in between, both around 12/32. These are Blizzak W965 which come with a whopping 18/32 of tread. Maybe it was a mechanical issue that caused uneven wear, I don't know. He ran them for one season, but I don't know how many miles he put on them. I ended up buying a single used tire with similar tread to the best one, so now at least I have two roughly matched pairs. They are also wearing pretty quickly, but at least they start with tons of tread.

I think the problem on the Prius is that the front wheels spin too easily. I try to accelerate gently while I have the snow tires on, but EV mode has so much torque that it's sometimes hard to avoid spinning the wheels if I need to accelerate quickly. I'm always in Eco mode.

I still think that the traction control system is poorly designed. I know that people complained about it cutting power on previous generations, so now they allow some wheel spin. But now they allow way too much wheel spin. If they have precise control of the speed of the motors (which I think they do to drive the motors), then they should be able to keep the speed from increasing too quickly if one or both wheels lose traction.

 

I would bet that your front tires were unusually low on pressure some of last winter. All Prius - not just the Prime - are torque-y from a standstill. I rarely drive my wife's Prius v but she takes off from a standstill like she's drag racing which might be why the tread of her Blizzak WS70's are uniformly down from 12/32 inch to 8/32 inch after 9,314 miles of use over six winters - I tallied up the log book entries today and measured the tread depth.

I'm a real stickler when it comes to tire rotations and checking tire pressures. Checking tire pressures often is more important during winter months in many areas since there can be extreme swings in temperatures. Every 10 degrees of temperature change means about 1 psi of tire pressure change.

Monitoring tire pressures was even more important during my ski days since I often stayed on the west edge of Lakewood and drove to the various Summit County ski areas. It could be sunny and 60 degrees in Lakewood but zero degrees and snowing at A-Basin which was my favorite nearby ski area. Going from 60 degrees to zero degrees meant a loss of 6 psi of tire pressure. I've always carried tire pumps - manual or electric - in my vehicles and pumped away - even in snow - while my friends made fun of me.

I don't remember if I said it in a previous thread but all the sets of Blizzaks we've had wore evenly. I remember only one occurrence of uneven wear on a set of tires in over 50 years of owning vehicles and that was caused by an alignment problem.

I'm going to lunch next Tuesday with people I used to work with. The last time I was in one of the lunch participant's vehicles I saw that his low tire pressure warning light was on while he was driving over 70 mph. When I told "Steve" that it meant that at least one of his tires was at least 8 psi low he said that he would air them up some day. I just want to bitch slap some people.

By the way, the new Blizzak WS90 that is replacing the WS80 is "supposed" to have substantially longer tread life - at least that's what they are advertising: Blizzak WS90 | Winter Tires | Bridgestone Tires

 

I check my tire pressure fairly regularly. I don't remember any of them getting unusually low last winter. It's possible that they might have been down to around 32-34 at the lowest if I forgot to check the pressure for a while. But I am almost obsessive about making sure the pressure in each tire is the same (or for this car 1 PSI higher in the front), so there's no way the fronts would have been significantly different than the rears.

They all had about 30 PSI left in them when I installed them yesterday, which is not bad for being in storage since March. I inflated them to 39 front/38 rear since it was still relatively warm out (50 degrees).

 

Among several reasons for rapid wear is that some localities use a very abrasive aggregate when they make their road pavement.

That can be dangerous. If the front has the better traction the car can pinwheel around the fronts if the rears lose traction and the fronts grip.

 

Well he's going to have to drive like a reasonable person. Unfortunately, it's impossible to always have the best tires on the rear of a FWD vehicle since it is the front tires that suffer the most wear. That's why frequent tire rotation is especially important so that the tires on the front will never have that much less tread than the ones on the rear.

 

My commute is mostly on a concrete highway, so that could be part of it. But my OEM tires haven't shown any unusual wear despite everything else being about the same.

I'm not worried about it, and by the time we're deep into winter another 2/32 will probably be worn off the better two tires that are now on the front. I think vehicle stability control can mostly make up for the difference in traction. I know it's not perfect and can't make traction where there is none, but it's good enough to compensate for a lot of external inputs. Whenever I've played around in a snowy parking lot, I've never been able to get a VSC car to significantly rotate. I can try it again next snow storm, but last time I tried the Prime was extremely stable while emergency braking on snow.

 

The nordmen 7's weigh 19 lbs and the steelies are 19 1/2 lbs

 

I'd be surprised if the steel rims (15"?) are 17 lbs, more likely 16.something.

 

At least one Corolla OEM replica 15" steel wheel weighs 20lb by the spec. None of the true OEM parts has weight info I can find.
2009-2019 15x6 Toyota Corolla Steel Wheel Rim - Road Ready - Road Ready Wheels - OEM Replica Wheel Supplier

According to the spec, my 15" Xice3 is 19lb and MB ICON alloy wheel is 16lb, total should be 35lb. I weighed it when I got them new with tires mounted on a wheel. The old bath scale said 32lb together, but the scale might have been off by a couple of pounds. I will try weighing it again using a luggage scale I purchased recently. I will also check the OEM wheel and tire combo when I do the change over.

 

I feel ya on that one

 

I'm pretty sure I did the calc a while back, only issue, similar to your scenario: it was with a mounted X-Ice, wheel weights and valve. The weight was lowish, but I wasn't sure how much to deduct for the tire, since it's tread's somewhat worn down.

I'm gonna put money on 16 pounds though, lol.

I had it suspended from Chestnut Tools Portable Electronic Scale: