Misplacedyankee

My Noikian WR experience...so I am going to be the lone wolf on this one, but overall I have been disappointed in these tires given the hype around here...

I run 18 OEMs year round on my 2.7T allroad - I bought my WRs as an all-season and ran them all year for a year now and actually have 25K miles on them. My story:

When I got them first mounted had major problems. The local Nokian dealer sucks at putting on tires (STS) so after getting much vibration I have them road force balanced by the dealer. We found one tire defective. Nokian gives me a new one. Major vibrations are now gone, but getting vibrations from 45-65 every now and again (very annoying) another road force balance does nothing. All rims are straight, CVs good etc. No other problems, never have been.

Finally after 10-15K miles all my vibrations are pretty much gone? The tires do very well in snow and wet and handle well in the dry as well. At this point was ok with it all despite the initial headaches.

I am now at 25K and slightly above the wear bars (although if you look at the tire it looks to have good tread. Today I nearly lost control of my allroad in the rain. I recently noticed the tires sucking in the wet weather, they just have the floating feeling on wet surfaces (thus why I looked at the tread). Maybe I have gotten too used to the good wet weather handling and drive far too fast (it is quattro after all), but today flying down a wet road on a slanted downhill the whole car slid out on me which in my 120K miles across my allroads has never happened to me. This is also a road right by my house I drive down all the time the same way. I corrected (with a tanker truck coming right at me mind you) and was no worse for the wear, but that really sucks. Based on the wear bar I should get another 5K out of these, but after today I am dumping them now.

So for me its an overall thumbs down. I am going to find some new tires under a different brand. Thoughts? I like the all season type and given its mid-january I think I need to go that route as I don't feel like a mount and remount for summer.

Thanks for listening to the rant. I know many will blast me, but thats my experience.

BTW -- to defend Nokian they did pay for all the road force balances and sent me another $100 for my troubles...That was very nice of them, but they are still very expensive tires for what I got out of them.

gideon-sf

It was pretty worn, so got 2 new
so it cost be about $600


I also had to go back,cuz it wasnt balanced correctly the first time (shake 45-70+) peak shake about 55-60

The indy said, he'd let me store one at the shop

The the outsourced tire installer Leos in SF (from the indy) kept the other good one, with some bs like it was destroyed, cmon, they kept and/or sold it

xtreetoes

you can try free for 45 days. Might be worth a try.

ChattanoogAR

Not sure if they're available in your size, but my 235/55/17's were $76/ea (TireRack) and still run true after a few thousand miles and w/o road force balancing.

My $0.02

Misplacedyankee

I will have to check to see if they are in my size.

mustbeaudi

25000 on allroad tires is good, and any tire at or below 4/32nds is trash.

Misplacedyankee

I don't have a measure, but my guess is these are 5/32nds or 6/32nds. I think thats why I am mad they are trash.

Misplacedyankee

LOL. Yeah they probably sold it!

Judge AR

the only other allseasons with the severe service that I know of are Nokian WR G2s (love them so far, very different tread pattern than the WRs, but I loved them to) and Vredestein Wintertrac4, which I considered trying (Vredesteins availability is relatively new to the US, but they have an excellent reputation in Europe) but they run like $245 a tire (for 17s), and again I've never had a disappointing experience with Nokians, so I didnt think it was worth the risk.

Any allseason without the severe service emblem is going to perform pretty bad in snow and ice, not sure how important that is to you, and that certainly doesn't mean you wouldn't be able to get by on them.

Now with that in mind I would focus on the summer/dry/wet performance of the tire. There are plenty of allseason that will excel in those areas Falken 512, Pirelli Pzero M&S, and Michilin Pilot A/S are all good examples and excellent allseasons when you dont take snow/winter performance into account.

gideon-sf

Actually Randy from Advanced Audi went on vaca and he tried to follow up too, actually eyeballing thru their used tire stock
The whole thing turned murky
and I gave up on this one
I would like to roll up to leos (in a different car or bike of course) and and if they have any of the 18 wr for sale
and eye their stock too, the tread pattern pretty distinctive