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Standard lecture...
You may drive conservatively, but in an emergency (you or your wife or kids), the tire traction, braking distance and steering response for accident avoidance is truly limited by the tires. Braking distance is controlled by tires, not brake pads etc. Different brake kit only effects petal feel, not single stop braking distance. Performance tires will stop, grip and respond in the wet or cold and wet when many all season tires simply become useless. ABS&ESP will allow control but will provide control in a lesser stopping and steering performance envelope that might intersect a hard object that you might otherwise avoid with better tires. I regard the expense of better tires as an insurance to avoid some damaging/injuring/killing situations as opposed to classic insurance that pays off when things go very wrong. At the very least, you avoid the vehicle in front and get rear ended and then you are not at fault at all with significant insurance implications.
You do not have to be an agressive driver to need max performance tires! You might need training or instruction to know what the vehicle can do in an emergency situation. (Aero academy is priceless!)
Lecture II
Many tires sold for long tread live last too long and harded from age and heat. These can be so hard well before they wear out, that dry traction is quite limited and wet traction is simply horrible. So by all reason these tires in this state should be thrown out even with lots of tread depth. So the economy of these tires is totally false. The danger is worse in warmer climates where heat aging is more severe. As these tires age harden, they become even more wear resitant and they can ultimately be thrown out from noise wear patterns instead of lack of tread depth*. The sad part is that many folks have no idea that the tire traction has deteriorated to the point of being dangerous.
* tossing out long life tires with lots of tread depth that have lost traction is false economy, running tires that have lost traction past such a point is really a dangerous/dumb thing to do
More rant: If you have better tires and another equal Saab has lesser tires with special brake pads, special rotors, stainless steel brake pads, the vehicle with the better tires will have better single stop braking performace than the vehicle with the expensive brake gear. This point is to stress the importance of the tires. The tires are the limiting factor to braking and steering performance. Better brake hardware provides better performance with repeated agressive braking that creates very high temperatures and provides for a better petal feel. But when sh!t happens, you need to hit the petal as hard as you can and then everything else that happens is a function of tire traction. Crappy tires kill.
More rant: You read and watch vehicle road tests on TV with stopping distances etc. What they are testing is mostly the tires, not the brakes. ABS systems will mostly take advantage of all of the available tire traction. So the results are really not something intrinsic to the vehicle design itself. And the results are very much determined by tire pressure, tire/track temperature, pavement and the amount of rubber crumb left on the brake test section from prior runs or other vehicles. So the test is really more of an evaluation of the tires than the vehicle itself. If the same vehicle was fitted with max/ultra performance tires, the results would be more impressive.
Modern braking system have the ability to provide enough braking effort to take the tires to the point of, thresold of, lockup. So the braking performance is not essentually braking effort limited, but tire limited.
other than that, I do not have any strongly held opinions :)
, Wed, 3 Aug 2005 18:36:22
, Sun, 31 Jul 2005 17:15:59
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