Do you want to know the benefits of using summer tires? Is it better to have separate summer and winter tires? Let us look at the answers to these questions in the following sections.
Benefits of Summer Tires
Use of these tires results in improved speed as well as better braking and cornering competence due to use of specialized rubber compounds and tread patterns.
Due to their tread patterns, summer tires are able to vacate water properly and counter the problem of hydroplaning.
These tires also offer improved wet and dry road grip compared to all-season ones.
Many of these tires are asymmetrical, limiting driver's flexibility to rotate his or her tires, which helps to increase tire's lifespan.
Summer tires have flexible tread compounds, which results in increased traction on the road.
Having low rolling resistance, these tires let the car move with lesser resistance and result in lesser use of force and gas.
Why winter tires?
Summer tires can be used in fall as well as spring and as such, these can be considered 3 season tires. However, in winter the temperature starts to fall, and it is better to shift over to winter tires.
Summer tires generally use a pliable elastic and its flexibility goes down significantly in the colder months. In very low temperatures the tread compound may well crack and cause complete damage of your tires.
Another reason why summer tires are not good for the winter season is that treads on summer tires are such that they do not perform well on snow and ice. Additionally, there will be long braking distance for summer tires on snow due to their low rolling resistance. On the other hand, winter tires tend to have deeper treads, which provide reduced braking time. Similarly, the compound used for making winter tires is softer and as such, the tire is less vulnerable in colder temperatures.
Since, summer tires are not built for the colder season, the treads of summer tires will stiffen and reduce traction on the road. Moreover, the tire will be losing elasticity and may well start to crack. In addition, there is a risk that the thread block which turned stiff during winter will chip.
Driving on such cracked and chipped tires will be very unsafe.
Having deep grooves, winter tires are able to better hold compacted snow, resulting in improved grip and traction. Due to this reasons, winter tires have shorter braking distance compared to other types of tires. These tires are also able to achieve better traction in any direction due to presence of sipes, which are tiny slits that are present in the tread pattern's inner section.
Moreover, winter tires have rubber compound the remains flexible and soft in very low temperatures, helping to keep them pliable and soft. But, such features also makes them unusable in summer months since such tires will wear quickly in hot weather conditions.
Summary
As we can see, it is better to use different set of tires for summer and winter months to achieve optimum driving performance.
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