Snow Tire Discussion

Tire Rack does not sell Nokians, locally Tire Factory sells them.   Nokian has a good website.  Online retailers included Tires by Web, Vucan tire, Bad Boy Tire, use your favorite search engine. Nokian snow tires are great snow tires with good wet traction. Old school snow tires have miserable wet traction. There does not exist a perfect tire for all condition, you would not want to use a pure winter tire from any manufacture as a autocross tire. I do have a friend that uses Hakka snow tires year round on his Euro van, but he probably has to replace them more frequently than if he had dedicated summer and winter tires.

First off a disclaimer: This info comes from a retailer (Tire Factory in Beaverton OR)  and may not be the full truth, but...

I just bought a set of 13" Hakka RSI's for my Alltrac. If you go to the Nokian web site you will find that the RSI and the Hakka Q have been replaced by the Hakka R for 2008/09. With that in mind I went to buy some R's and quickly found out that they weren't available. According to the Tire Factory, the warehouse "in Tennessee" (I presume a national distributor, where all nokkians come from?) doesn't have any of the new R's and probably won't get any this year. They did have a limited supply of RSI's, but it appears there might be a shortage this season.

I have no clue if this is truly a shortage of Nokkian tires or just a way to clear out older tires, but thought I'd pass this on.

In reality I think any real winter tire (with the mountain/snowflake logo- not "all season") will do a great job and so there's no reason not to get a different brand; for me it was multiple sources saying the hakkas are the best.

Less Schuab Jobbies and never turn back! They're the ones that put the waulnut shells in the compund...not that is using the ole' nut!

For a Seattle car (lots of rain, wet, and slush running back and forth from town to Snoqualmie for dawn patrols), how much of a performance hit do you take for getting studded tires and not studding them? I feel like I almost never encounter black ice, just copious quantities of wet snow. Are studs worth shredding our highways?

It appears as though the inexpensive studless tires don't come in sizes small enough to fit my little Escort (175/65R14) , hence the question.

Less Schuab Jobbies and never turn back!  They're the ones that put the waulnut shells in the compund...not that is using the ole' nut!

Translation please...

For a Seattle car (lots of rain, wet, and slush running back and forth from town to Snoqualmie for dawn patrols), how much of a performance hit do you take for getting studded tires and not studding them? I feel like I almost never encounter black ice, just copious quantities of wet snow. Are studs worth shredding our highways?

It appears as though the inexpensive studless tires don't come in sizes small enough to fit my little Escort (175/65R14) , hence the question.

Studs are lame, they are only useful for starting in snow. And yeah they tear up our roads too. Oh and everyone will hate you while you're driving around in town making that bubblewrap popping noise as you go.

Les Schwab tried to sell me some seriously under-performing-in-snow all weather tires the other day. They didn't even have any 18" snow tires. I don't know that I will be going back.