This is a decision worth making before the tyres are needed rather than in the middle of a cold snap. A summer tyre is a summer tyre because of its compound, not its tread pattern. Below roughly seven degrees that rubber stiffens and gives up grip in the wet and the cold, long before there is any question of snow.
A winter tyre uses a softer compound and a tread cut with thousands of fine slits that open under load and bite. It is genuinely better here from about November to March and genuinely worse in July, when the soft compound squirms and wears quickly. It also means two sets, two fitting sessions a year and somewhere to keep four wheels you are not using.
All-season sits between the two and is honest about it. It carries the mountain and snowflake marking, it works at five degrees and at twenty five, and it will beat neither specialist at its own end of the year. For most cars kept around here that is the sensible answer. We will fit whichever of the three you settle on, at home or where you work.
A tyre bought in a hurry is usually the wrong tyre. Once it is settled, the van comes to you in SE10 with the tyre already on board, fits it where the car stands and balances every wheel it touches. Old tyres leave Blackheath, Westcombe Park and SE10 with us, every time. You watch it happen in Westcombe Park, or at the kerb in Maze Hill.
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The choice matters more around Greenwich than the mileage suggests. Cars here do short cold journeys, the climb away from Blackheath and the roads up towards Maze Hill go greasy first in a frost, and the setts near the town centre turn slick with very little rain on them. A compound that has gone hard shows itself on exactly those surfaces.
A family had decided on a winter set until the storage question came up. Four wheels in a flat with no garage, twice a year, on a car that mostly does short local runs. All-season went on instead, on the driveway.
A couple of hours in a staff car park near the A2 Blackwall Lane, four all-season tyres, each one balanced before it went back on. Planned in advance, so nobody lost a day to a waiting room.
An owner assumed four wheel drive covered them in the cold. It helps you pull away and does nothing for braking or cornering, which is where winter grip is actually spent. They went to all-season on all four.
Most people do not. We get a handful of genuinely cold weeks and very little lying snow, against two sets, two changeovers and storage space. If you regularly drive somewhere colder through the winter the sums change.
Yes, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. They give up a little dry braking to a summer tyre and a lot of deep snow ability to a winter one, and they wear slightly faster. What you get back is never having the wrong tyre on.
Please do not. Mixing types across the axles gives you one end of the car gripping and the other letting go, which is worse than either type fitted all round. If you go winter, go winter on all four.
Before you need them. Tread falls away slowly and then matters all at once, usually on the first cold wet morning of the year. If you are near the wear markers in autumn, that is the moment, and we can fit on your drive or at work.
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