If you plan to drive during the winter season, you need to make sure you have tires that they are approved for winter use. When it comes to winter tires, they should be approved to be able to be sold as winter tires. This is not always true when it comes to all-weather tires or some other more all-round type of tire. You might be fooled into believing that the tires are winter approved, but they are not. The all-season tires that are available in North America, sounds like they would be usable during the winter season, but this is not the case. The all-season tires cover all seasons except the winter season. Here you instead should use winter approved all-weather tires.
For the all-weather tires, if they are winter approved, they can be used for all weather conditions and you can forget about the weather forecast. You can use these tires all year round or only use them for the colder period and then use all-season tires during the really warm period. The advantage of doing this is that you can have very good performance during the summer, as summer tires can provide a better performance during hot days. This might be of interest if you have a high-performance car. The all-weather tires can then make sure that you are still safe during the unstable period where you might have good weather or bad weather.
If you live in areas that will for sure have a long winter, then this doesn’t really make sense, as you are better off then changing to a set of dedicated winter tires and then alternate between these and the high performance summer tires to provide you with the best performance throughout the year.
Tires that are approved for winter use will need to have the Alpine severe service emblem on the sidewall of the tires. It isn’t enough to have M+S marking, as that doesn’t indicate that they have passed any performance tests in server conditions.
For more information regarding tires that are officially approved for winter use, visit: https://www.nokiantires.com/