Quote:
Originally Posted by Mathme
I too like the looks of the 20" however since I drag a boat around in the summer and drive up to the snow in the winter, the 19" with all seasons makes a better choice for me as the tires provide a better mix of all-around driving.
If I were to upgrade to two sets of wheels/tires, I'd go to 21" summer rubber and the keep the 19" with winter tires. But like the OP said, my only concern is all that street rubber down on a wet boat ramp in the summer.
Tires like most things are a trade-off.
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You nailed it, tires are indeed always trading one thing for another. My point with this post isn't that the 20" tires are bad, they, in fact, seem pretty excellent to me in the right conditions (dry pavement particularly). It's just that they are SO slanted toward dry pavement performance that they make huge compromises in other areas (wet, mud, snow being the big ones). These tires make perfect sense if you drive only on dry pavement and you drive your car very hard and need the extra grip that a tire like this can/will produce.
My argument is that I think very few buyers of an X5 are driving exclusively on dry pavement and, an even smaller subset of that group is driving the car hard enough to experience the difference between a max performance summer tire and an all season. Sure, there are some out there (probably a lot of them on this forum!), but, IMHO, it's far less common that the buyer who drives their X5 in bad road conditions/boat ramps/off road, all of which the stock tires are between "bad" and "so bad you'd have to be suicidal to try it" at. Also, even if you never do driving "in the slop" you still have the crazy soft compound (which, of course, means terrible longevity) to deal with. On tires like this I'd be happy to get 10K miles and thrilled with 15K. A all season (read, harder compound), you'd probably get double that (happy with 20K, thrilled with 30K).
Just seems like a whole lot sacrificed to get better performance on, what is, at the end of the day, a truck, not a sports car. On an M3/M5, this kind of setup would, IMHO, make perfect sense. On a truck that's most often driven as a daily driver/grocery getter (and very often driven by women who have no interest in taking it anywhere in the zipcode of it's limits?).. Seems silly to me..
We've got a trip scheduled over Thanksgiving up into the mountains and I'm going to change to all season tires at that time, I'll let you all know how I think they perform compared to the stock setup.