Tyre News

Think there’s no such thing as a bad tyre these days – think again. Auto Bild Allrad evaluated ten SUV tyres but can only recommend eight – and it’d prefer us to avoid one altogether. The upshot is that it still pays to do your homework when buying replacement tyres.

Your tyre size is displayed on the side of your current tyres. It is made up of five important pieces of information: WIDTH, PROFILE, RIM SIZE, SPEED RATING, and LOAD INDEX.

When testing tyres, car magazines and motoring clubs are confronted with the good, the bad and the ugly. But things were a little different for Gute Fahrt this time round – in its summer 2019 test, all candidates put in a performance worthy of a rating of ‘good’ or better. This was a first for the German magazine – usually at least one protagonist is burdened with a lowlier rating.

There were no nasty surprises in this year’s Auto Bild summer tyre test. A knockout round of wet and dry braking tests had already rooted out any mad, bad and dangerous to know tyres. All of the 20 candidates remaining from the original field of 53 gave a good account of themselves in the expanded test round. Six of their number even received Auto Bild’s top ‘exemplary’ rating.

Drivers in the UK and Europe are turning to all-season tyres in growing numbers. Cooper Tire Europe aims to meet demand with an entirely new range, the Cooper Discoverer All Season.

When evaluating tyres for the coming summer season, German motoring magazine Autozeitung looked at ten brands of 235/45 R18 rubber, a size commonly found on large family saloons and estates. Testing was conducted using a Skoda Superb and the results yielded a surprise or two: While we weren’t especially astonished to see the Continental PremiumContact 6 (runner-up in last year’s Autozeitung test) in first place and the Michelin Primacy 4 in second, the Maxxis Premitra HP5 entered unfamiliar territory by securing space on the podium – as far as WhatTyre is aware, this is the first time the Premitra HP5 has achieved a podium finish.