How To Pick The Right Tires For Your Vehicle

Choosing new tires for your vehicle is an intimidating process. With hundreds of manufacturers each selling a range of tires, your options become overwhelming very quickly. Tires are one of the few parts of your car where the most premium option doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best choice for your vehicle. Higher grip tires may improve the performance of your Ferrari or Porsche, but may actually decrease both the performance and economy of your daily driven Volkswagen Jetta. We put together a list of our favorite tires so any of your vehicles.

Understanding What Tire Your Vehicle Needs

Our first tip for choosing the new tires is to decide on what you need out of each of your vehicles. Is your car a daily driver where tread life and low road noise are the priority? Maybe your daily doubles as a track weapon or an off-road adventurer on the weekends. The properties to consider when choosing a tire are tread wear patterns, road noise levels, the terrain you’ll be traveling on, what traction level your car requires, and if your car needs run-flats or not.

Our Favorite Tire for High-Performance Road and Track Vehicles – Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2

When it comes to maximum traction and raw mechanical grip on a street tire, nothing comes close to Michelin’s Pilot Sport Cup 2 and Cup Sport 2 R tires. Developed as an OEM tire for the 991 generation Porsche GT2 RS, the Cup 2 managed to help put all 690 hp to the ground with as little drama as possible. Michelin has gone on to fit the improved Pilot Sport 2 to other vehicles and has found an average improvement of 0.5 seconds per kilometer in the dry.

The Pilot Sport range is so impressive that it is a homologated tire not only for Porsche, but for Ferrari and Mercedes-Benz AMG too, and is the preferred tire for manufacturers attempting best times for production cars around the Nürburgring Nordschleife. The downside of the Cup 2’s is that they do wear faster than most road tires and offer a far harder and stiffer ride than traditional road tires.

Our Favorite Daily High-Performance Tire – Pirelli P Zero

Pirelli’s P Zero may not boast the 0.5s per km improvement of the Pilot Sport Cup 2’s, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a seriously impressive tire. Unlike The Pilot Sport Cups which is a track tire that happens to be road legal, the P Zero is a purpose-built high-performance road tire that makes as little compromise as possible while offering all the grip you could need on the street.

The P Zero makes use of Pirelli’s Noise Cancelling System to offer an impressively quiet drive for the level of traction it offers, while still offering a fairly stiff but responsive feel. The P Zero still isn’t a perfect tire as many consumers have reported that the tread wear is higher than average, which is to be expected for any high-performance tire.

The Best Tire for High Mileage Hero’s – Goodyear Assurance MaxLife

As the name suggests, Goodyear’s Assurance MaxLife has one of the longest-lasting tread-life of any tire on the market and is perfect for any vehicle that is expected to have plenty of miles put on the clock. While there are plenty of long-lasting tread life tires on the market, what makes the Assurance MaxLife so special is that it has a far higher traction rating than its opposition in both wet and dry conditions.

The truly stand-out feature of the Assurance MaxLife is an all-season tire that doesn’t fall into the trap of other all-season tires. Most all-season tires tend to have a bias towards either summer or winter, but Goodyear has found a way to have pretty consistent performance in both seasons. The downside of the Assurance MaxLife is due to the deeper tread, road noise is a little louder than average, and that they are outperformed by competitors that are summer or winter tires only.

Best Tire for Beating a Budget – Cooper CS5 Grand Touring

So far, we’ve only really mentioned some rather expensive tires, and we completely understand that sometimes you need to fit new tires on a budget. Being on a budget doesn’t mean you should sacrifice quality or safety. Cooper Tires don’t offer any high performance, but their CS5 Grand Touring is designed with their main focus being on safety making them an excellent choice for any passenger vehicle.

Cooper Tires fall short as they are an independent tire manufacturer and aren’t widely available. Being an independent tire manufacturer also means that they only carry a select range of tire sizes.

The Best All-Terrain Tires – Pirelli Scorpion ATR

The Pirelli Scorpion ATR stands out for us because while it offers amazing performance off-road, it is a comfortable tire for everyday road driving. This should come as no surprise as the Scorpion ATR benefits from the same Noise Cancelling System as the P zero. Customers are often left disappointed as Pirelli doesn’t offer the Scorpion ATR in the majority of OEM tire sizes.

Buy Tires for Your Vehicle at Foreign Affairs Motorwerks

As South Florida’s premier race facility and an authorized dealer for Michelin, Dunlop and Pirelli Foreign Affairs Motorwerks are uniquely positioned to offer you the best advice when choosing a new tire that will suit your needs and your budget. Feel free to see for yourself by visiting our shop in Pompano Beach or by booking your car today.