Tyre Awards

An independent tyre dealer in Moray, Scotland triumphed over national chains to win the 2025 Tyre Industry Award for the Overall Tyre Retailer of the Year last week. GT Tyres (Forres) has been transformed in the four years since Joanne and David Philip took over in 2021 – improvements that were sufficient to wow the National Tyre Distributors Association’s judging panel. The Highlands retailer, a Michelin Quality Centre, described the award as totally unexpected, given the quality of contenders, which included some familiar names and large companies in the tyre sector. Director David Philip gave the credit to the whole team behind the centre: “This award is for the team and their hard work. They thoroughly deserve it.”

Three Hankook products made the podium in the 2025 WhatTyre Tyre of the Year Awards, featured in the WhatTyre Buyers Guide 2025. The fifth consecutive year of the prestigious awards highlighted the top tyres on the market across nine different categories, using the site’s proprietary Tyrescore algorithm and its experienced panel of tyre business editors to help identify the best available tyres. Two of the six commended tyres won in their categories: the Hankook Ventus evo was Performance Tyre of the Year 2025 in its debut year, while the Hankook iON evo continued its dominance of the specialist Electric Car Tyre category, retaining its 2024 crown.

Welcome to the fifth edition of the WhatTyre Tyre of the Year Awards and Buyers Guide. The website’s editorial team, which has almost 60 years’ collective experience in writing about tyres and the tyre industry, has selected more than 70 outstanding tyres across nine categories that collectively represent the best products currently available for road-going cars in all categories. While this sounds like a lot, bear in mind the vast array of brands and products available in the UK’s replacement tyre sector: since WhatTyre began, more than 700 tyre brands have been available in tyre retail outlets around the country. In 2025, a record 21 brands have been recognised for the quality of their products, including the world’s most recognisable tyre marques and several sub-premium brands with which general motorists may not already be familiar. This year also sees Chinese brands Sailun and Linglong recognised for their rapidly advancing capabilities and products that are increasingly competing with more lauded mid-range brands on performance.

The pinnacle of the performance tyre spectrum belongs to the Supersports or ultra-ultra-high performance (UUHP) tyre. While fully road legal, these tyres are meticulously engineered to deliver unparalleled performance on the track. Yet their primary mission is to offer a dynamic and safe driving experience for the world’s most powerful cars, excelling in both wet and dry conditions.

Although tyres for 17- and 18-inch rims are gradually losing market share to larger diameter products, the range of high-performance tyres available in the UK remains enormous, with budget brands accounting for around one third of purchases. However, cheaper options may not always offer the best handling and stopping power. Choosing the right tyre is therefore crucial for safety and performance.

To identify the best summer tyres for 2025, we leveraged our extensive Tyrepedia database, which houses performance data on hundreds of thousands of tyres from around 700 brands. We then applied our proprietary Tyrescore algorithm to narrow down the top contenders based on key performance indicators. The Tyrescore begins with an analysis of the EU-mandated tyre label, which includes ratings for wet grip, fuel efficiency (measured via rolling resistance), and external pass-by noise. These letter-based ratings are converted into numerical scores, with greater weight given to wet grip and fuel efficiency, reflecting their higher relevance to most drivers.

The increasing search for sustainable practices in mobility and the rising cost of living are two major themes informing this year’s WhatTyre Eco Tyre Award. In many ways, these two macrotrends appear to be in conflict, as manufacturers pass on the costs of producing their goods in more sustainable ways to the consumer. However, many of the best ecological methods in tyre production, such as reducing the materials needed to produce a tyre or sourcing materials from circular economy sources. For our 2025 guide to eco tyres, WhatTyre looks at some of the most sustainable products, but also some low-cost options that offer some other form of sustainability, whether this means the products’ performance, the product’s support for more sustainable motoring in the form of EV compatibility or high energy efficiency, or the manufacturer’s ability to comply with higher standards in ESG, an acronym that stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance.

The dynamism of the electric car market sees new, specialist manufacturers, especially those from China, rubbing shoulders with EV editions of familiar shapes from the world’s biggest auto brands. Electric-powered cars (EVs) are different in a few ways those with internal combustion engines (ICE) and tyre manufacturers have been altering their product strategies for the segment. Many alterations are in conjunction with the car makers, who need the product to be suitable enough for their new models to roll off production lines and into customers’ hands. The tyres originally fitted to these vehicles are altered in order to improve synergy with the vehicle – this is nothing unusual, but the difference in a characteristic such as wear rate with EVs is much more stark than normal variations between ICE vehicles. Michelin, a leading supplier of original tyres to EV models in their initial growth phase, estimates that the same tyre variant fitted to a comparable EV will wear 20% faster than the same tyre fitted to an ICE powered car.

WhatTyre’s Winter Tyre of the Year 2025 shortlist offers 13 winter tyres that between them offer market-leading options to achieve an optimal cold weather driving experience for drivers of all types of cars. The selected tyres not only represent the best winter tyres that are widely available at the time of this guide’s publication; they also offer a range of products that cover the largest SUVs and the most powerful performance cars down to the most compact runarounds.