wwest

It sounds as if you have NEVER experienced the activation of PSM...Shame, that.


Thrust me, Seattle = Wy NOT!!

SecretAsianMan

Do you take your car out to the ski hills a lot or something? I've lived in Seattle for coming on six years and I think I've seen snow maybe five times.

The rare occasion there's snow I just hop on the bus or work from home.

JustinCase

It depends on your elevation. My house is at 650' and we usually see more, and more severe snow than down in Seattle, Bellevue, etc. It is also usually approximately 5 degrees colder up here, often with completely different weather (i.e., the "convergence zone").

In addition, the roads in the foothills (aka "boonies") don't see much traffic and are not serviced as well or as often, so we see a lot of black ice when it's just fine in Seattle. Add to that the hills, the extra curves (great for summer!). I drive in the rain just fine with summer tires down to about 35 degrees, but it is just plain dangerous to take my car out with summer tires when there might be any ice in the foothills.

SecretAsianMan

Suppose that's true - but the chances of getting snow outside of Dec-Feb here is basically nil, so I don't see why you'd want to drive on winter tires year round.. But if it doesn't bother you, more power to you.

I moved here from a place where the average daily temperature 4-5 months a year is lower than Seattle's all time record low temperature Elevation was around 4000' and there was snow on the ground (inches to feet of it, not the dusting Seattle gets) 6+ months a year. Even there I couldn't stand to drive on Winter tires when the roads were dry. A good winter tire has sidewalls as stiff as a deflated basketball and about as much grip.

brad@tirerack.com

Most prefer to get the most performance from the car year round. To do that (especially in a sports car, you need to do it in season-specific tires. Can you run a winter tire year round? Sure. But if you do it's just with the understanding that specific handling characteristics will be sacrificed. I have driven winter tires year round in my own car after deciding that they were not going to make it another winter but did have some tread left. Overall I kinda of liked them to be honest - for awhile. At the end they were terrible in the rain and were almost unbearably loud. The cornering and lane changing capability was very slow and sluggish as well. It all didn't really bother me however because I was prepared for it and wanted to get the most life out of them as I could. Would I make a practice of it? Maybe only if I drove a lower performance car very sparingly and handling wasn't a big deal to me. On a Buick, maybe; but not on a Porsche.

FifthGear

This is one weird thread.

What's possible and what's recommended are two very different things. You can "do" anything, so the thread is pointless.

What's recommended is obvious. With the wrong tire choice for the conditions, if you push the tire to it's limits, it will perform poorly. You can drive around slowly on any tire in any condition and the tire is not going to "fail".

Also, driving a C4 in the winter is entirely possible. I have a 2012 C4S with winter wheels and tires and although it's not as good as our Audi Quattros, it's plenty capable in snow. To suggest otherwise is ridiculous, unless there's so much snow that the car becomes a snow plow. The Porsche Winter Driving Experience is proof of that.

May I suggest we move on...

sjfehr

If you enjoy breaking loose at low speeds, you needn't look any further than running summer tires in the winter The track, though, is where you can have that same fun at much high speeds. Nothing like a little oversteer pulling a 1+g turn at 100mph to get the heart pumping. You can't do that on snow tires.

I second all those who recommended getting summer tires for the summer. These cars are EXTREMELY dependent on tires to get the expected performance out of them- you paid a lot of money to drive a Porsche, why handicap it with crappy-for-the-season tires? No reason to artificially limit your car's performance. Run your winter tires this winter, and then get Damon to hook you up an extra set of wheels with some BFG Rivals for this summer- you won't regret it! (I'm super happy with the O.Z. Alleggerita wheels in my avatar pic, btw, if you're looking for suggestions.)

Manifold

FWIW, I have all-season tires on one of my cars (AMG), and I won't be doing that again. It's a good option if you want to be lazy and have tires that 'sort of' work most of the year, but the all-seasons are inadequate for real winter conditions and can't withstand anything close to spirited summer or track use, so their usable operating window is fairly narrow.

Winter tires arguably have as much operating window as all-seasons, because they're good in winter, late fall, and early spring, but they won't last at all under serious summer/track use.

So IMO, best bet is winter tires in winter, and summer/track tires the rest of the year. Switch them on the same set of rims if you don't want to get extra rims.

mander

As has been suggested by ab996 Nokian WR is a Porsche approved WINTER tire that comes in 235/295 sizing and N rating but is also an AS tire. In fact when I bought WINTER tires and wheels from my local Porsche Dealer that is what they provided. I think they are an excellent tire for my C4S in the winter. A colleague runs an A6 with them year round without a problem. Would I run them on my C4S during the summer? I could but heck no. Takes too much of the pleasure out of driving.

Dadio

To the OP... Well you heard it here, forget anything you ever read about the differences between winter and summer tires as it appears from some the responses here you can do anything you want. All tires last forever and winter tires are as good as summer tires all the time particularly in
Seattle. I'm sure if you start a thread about driving on tires without any tread left you'll get responses from people saying they ride on their tires until the steel belts wear away and they won't hold air. Of course there's always duct tape to allow to you to get a little more life out of 'em. Happy motoring.

PiB993

I'm a firm believer that winter tires deliver substantial performance in the snow that really do prevent accidents. However, I found Z-rated high performance summer tires lacking in the summer unless you auto cross or track. In particular I found Z-rated tires on my E36 M3 (Micheline Pilots) to lack grip in the rain, damp, cold mornings, and dusty road conditions. (Less grip does equal more fun!) I ran some Dunlop snow tires in the summer and it was fine. They had just as much grip as the Z's in the dry and more when it was cold, damp, dusty or rain. They also wore out slower than the summer hi-po tires and were slightly quieter. Just my experience with those tires on that car. Personally, I have no problems seeing winter tires being used in the summer other than you are cutting into the winter performance with additional wear.

I don't see the practical point of hi-po summer tires unless you auto cross, track or drive like a maniac where you actually putting some heat into the tires. It may be I am looking at the closer to track like tires and not other summer tires with more grooves. Perhaps a proper alignment could work heat into hipo tires tires? Snow tires in the summer may benefit from a less aggressive alignment.

I just put all weather tires on my Turbo not for snow but for damp, cold, rain and possible light snow on hill tops. The sipping on the tires really adds grip in the damp on cold mornings on twisty hills.

PiB993

That said. From one tire to another there are big differences in performance, noise, compounds - etc. Above is just my experience. On the P-car I am comparing the stock Bridgestone Potenza S-02 to some Continental All Weather DWS.

sjfehr

You can't just lump all "Z" rated tires like they perform the same; the variations between tires are so great as to make your post completely useless. Potenza S-02 isn't even Bridgestone's performance tire, that's the RE-11. Nor are Michelin PS2 or PSS even in the top tier for performance- they're compromise tires for luxury cars. Nobody uses them for autocross (well, novices or occasional drivers maybe).

Dunlop Z1 Star Spec and Bridgestone RE-11, for example, are extremely grippy summer tires that require no warm-up period in all but near-freezing conditions, and handle great in the wet. Hankook RS-3 and Kumho XS require quite a bit of heat to work and I'd definitely not recommend either as a DD, especially not the XS for Seattle because it has poor wet performance. Continental DW (not the all-season DWS) might not be a bad tire in seattle considering how much rain there is, and how excellent of a wet weather performance tire the DW it is. Dunlop ZII and BFG Rival were just released this past month and are looking like they instantly made every other performance tire on the market obsolete- we'll know in a few months I think.

The thing about autocross tires is that that grip largely applies to real-life driving, too. Track tires have time to build up lots of heat, but autocross tires don't. 1.2gs on the skidpad is 1.2gs no matter whether you're in competition or you cocked up and just too that turn too fast. If you're going to strap on crappy tires, you might as well run a buick. In fact, Lincoln send out a "ringer" MKX with star specs on it, and edmunds (I think it was edmunds) found it was damned near equal to a 911 running PSSs in some of their handling benchmarks, despite the MKX being a horrible car with horrible handling. Tires matter!

Papa Fittig

Luxter

Been there. No T shirt though.
1970 911 T targa. That's how it all started.