This time, we are testing eleven all-season tires for four-wheel drive cars. The annual tire changes are no longer necessary, but do these tires also offer sufficient safety?
How nice would it be if the difficult tire changes were no longer necessary? No more twice a year to the garage to have the summer tires replaced by the winter tires and vice versa, no more lugging tires. And you no longer have to pay for the storage, if you don’t have space in the garage. The alternative sounds very attractive: once you invest money in good all-season tires, you no longer have to worry about changing. These types of tires are also permitted in countries where the legislator requires your car to be on winter tires in winter.
In many countries, the calendar guides this duty, while in others, such as Germany, the duty depends on weather conditions. When purchasing, it is important to check whether the tires you have in mind have passed the international tests, so that you can also drive these types of tires at our eastern neighbors and, for example, in the Alpine countries. Such an approved tire has the so-called 3 PMSF (Three Peak Mountain Snow Flake) logo on the sidewall, which consists of a mountain peak and a snowflake symbol. The tires participating in this test are all marked with this symbol and have passed the accompanying – by the way not very strict – test.
A few years ago, the all-season tire was still known as a not too convincing alternative for people who did not place high demands on the tires under their car. Both the summer and the winter properties were not very well reflected. In other words: a four-season tire used to be a bad summer tire and a bad winter tire. Nowadays that is a completely different story, as this test also shows. Some all-season tires can even keep up with the winter tire we tested for reference on snow. This applies, for example, to the Goodyear Vector 4Seasons Gen-3 and the Continental AllSeasonContact. There are also all-season tires that, in terms of performance on dry and wet roads, are very close to a summer tire, such as the winner of this test, the Hankook Kinergy 4S2 and the number 2, the new one Vredestein Quatrac. Tire manufacturers are faced with the challenge of achieving a particularly good grip on dry and wet surfaces, without having to compromise too much on snow performance. In this test, the tires from Hankook and Vredestein succeed in this the best, because they perform excellently on the ‘summer’ test items, without slipping through the ice in the tests on snow.
Which band is best for you, however, remains partly a matter of personal requirements. If you especially find the performance in winter conditions important, it is better to choose a snow champion such as the Continental, without it falling short on dry and wet roads. Some tires, however, do not succeed very well in this split between summer and winter qualities. This is especially true of the Taiwanese manufacturer Nankang. Its all-seasons score well with a very good grip on snow and a competitive price, but the (too) limited grip on wet roads is disappointing. The differences in performance are smaller with the Finnish Nokian tires, but there we see a similar picture: good on snow, moderate on wet roads. It can also be the other way round, as the Kumho tires show: downright impressive in terms of aquaplaning, moderate on snow. The tire repairmen should take a good look at that, because otherwise you would prefer winter tires under your car when you travel to winter sports.
The full Techzle Four-season tire test for all-wheel drive drivers with all candidates and all measurement results can be found this week in Techzle 47 (November 18-25), but is also available digitally at the bottom of this article.
Price comparator
With the Techzle Car tires Price comparison we offer you a handy tool to find the best offers on all-season tires. Currently, the price comparison site provides an overview of the full range of twenty different tire providers. Also are here all tire tests from previous years.
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