Quote:
Originally Posted by JK479
Can someone get by with RWD and the all season 18s? I'm not talking 6 inches of snow, but enough to make it home is there is a few inches on the ground.
I know RWD is a danger with summer tires. But no one talks about rwd and all seasons.
Is it worse than my current fwd and all seasons? I probably will not buy winter or summer tires.
|
On good AS tires you'll be fine to get home safely with RWD, but it really depends on how good the AS tires are.
Still for the most part AS tires will get you home safely in light snow.
FWD has the advantage of better accelerative traction as there is more weight over the drive tires, so it gets the car moving easier.
In the winter I put a couple of bags of sand or water softener salt in the trunk to add weight over the drive wheels.
I'm running Conti DWS AS tires and they great AS tires, in my experience they are the best performance AS tires in the market. Their cold performance is great on dry and wet/slushy road conditions, and in warmer weather they come very close to many actual summer performance tires.
In the winter snowy conditions you may consider lowering the tire pressure to get better grip. But, I use stock psi in the winter and increase the psi to the listed high speed/over 100mph rating on the door sill.
The higher pressure stiffens the AS tires softer sidewall and nicely improves steering feel and handling, and it helps in getting better MPG over all.
We haven't had a lot of snow around Chicago this winter, but we recently had a heavy snow fall around 6-8". I drove on snow covered roads, about 3-4", and salty slushy conditions will NO problems at all.
Proper driving technique and reasonable expectations are just as important as the tires in any given road condition.
IOW, there is no need for performance style driving when the road conditions are poor. With that and good AS tires your RWD BMW will get you where you need to go as long as you aren't going to drive in very hilly terrain or going to a ski slope.
