GET YOUR DEDICATED SNOW TIRES NOW !!!

I had a previous version of the Hankook Winter i*cept that was poor on hard packed snow or ice. It's good to know that the current version is so greatly improved.

 

All the performance graphs aside, I like a snow tire I can live with. One that won't drive me nuts with noise, ride like a truck tire, make me desparate to pull them off the second week of February.

 

At least, we can all agree on which one not to buy! LingLong Green-Max. LOL

@Rob43 I will wait to hear your real life user report on new and improved Hankook icept on PRIME this winter. In a mean time, I have at least 3-4 more seasons out of my winter wheel set with Xice-3.

 

Yeah, my X-Ice2 are going back on for the 10th year (purchased/installed November 2010), in a few weeks. They still have 7/32" tread depth, and no cracking, so I'll dub them good. We don't get out much, lol.

 

They have no cracking. I'm goin' for it...

 

I looked till my eyes were near-bleeding, couldn't not see a date code on the top tire of the stack. But I believe I saw it on one of them in past, and it was roughly July of 2010, so they'll turn 10 in July of 2020. They are on the car for about 4 months a year, garage washed, dried and garage stored, in a stack with UV blocking cover the rest of the year.

 

What about tire pressure sensors (TPMS) and programming? I didn't see the cost of TLMS mentioned in this post or any of the others in this thread. Tire stores where I live including Discount Tire will not mount tires on wheels without TPMS sensors. Maybe a person could get a "mom & pop" store to do it but the big chains won't.

 

Jus for editing, it is TPMS (Tire Pressure Monitor System), not TLMS. You can skip TPMS if you order wheel and tire together and ask the installer to balance and mount them on TPMS sensor less wheels, and you do your own installing. Yes, there is a law in the US that requires tire shops not to disable functioning TPMS. Therefore, if you currently have functioning TPMS on your summer tires, most tire shops will not install the tires without TPMS onto your car, but they will mount and balance tires onto wheels without TPMS sensors. I ordered wheels and tires from Discount Tire Online without TPMS. The tires came mounted and balanced free of charge with regular rubber valves. All I had to do was to swap the summer wheels with winter wheels.

 

TLMS, LOL! Brain cramp. That was a software product used where I retired 9 months ago! Of course it is TPMS.

I was talking about the Discount Tire store a few blocks from my house and other large local tire outlets. They won't install tires on wheels that don't have pressure sensors. Maybe they would if someone took the wheels in separately from the vehicle and told them they were for an older vehicle that didn't have TPMS. I know that if I did that at Costco, the first time I took a vehicle in for a free tire rotation, they wouldn't touch them due to the wheels not having TPMS. Costco has become completely sticklers about following the rules.

Winter certainly isn't the time of the year we want to be driving without TPMS ... or any time of year for that matter. We were sailing along comfortably at 70 mph about 100 miles from home a couple of months ago when the TPMS warning light came on. The affected tire was on the left rear and the car was still driving normally. I pulled off the Interstate and pumped the tire up to the maximum on the sidewall with the air compressor I carry. The TLMS light was on again before we got to the next community of any size 25 miles down the road so I pulled off the road and pumped up the tire again. That gave me enough time to get to a tire store.

The flat tire was ruined by a huge bolt and the compact spare wasn't viable since we had 300 miles left to drive and a medical appointment to make. The whole experience cost us only about 45 minutes. TPMS totally saved the day. If it hadn't alerted me, I would have likely completely trashed the tire, would have had to mount the spare tire, would have lost far more time and not made the medical appointment. We were fortunate that that "next community" was large enough to have tire stores and that the one we stopped at had the tire size we needed although it was a crap brand. There was only one other community during that 125 mile segment of the trip that had a tire store.

This was the third flat tire this year on just this one vehicle - quite a run of bad luck, eh?

Tire pressure sensors have become pretty cheap. We have them on multiple sets of winter wheels/tires. I do the vehicle ECU programming myself with a cheap handheld tool that paid for itself the first day I used it. We will never again drive without TPMS.

 

For the online sale, Discount Tire give you option of balancing and mounting the tires on wheels with or without TPMS when you buy a set. For a physical store, I would think if you buy wheels and tires together, they will do the same for you. If you just buy tires, I am not sure what they will do. They will not mount and install them onto your car without TPMS if you now have TPMS on them, but if you bring your own wheels, maybe they will. Your Costco seems to be going beyond the what law requires. If your car has no TPMS sensors when you pull in, then all they have to do is to note that fact in invoice and they should be able to service the tire without TPMS sensor. They are not "disabling" anything.

TPMS can sure be a life savor. The problem is that PRIUS TPMS is dumb system that only warns when tire pressure goes down 25% or more. It has no display of real time tire pressure to monitor them. Plus, the OEM sensors are rather expensive and re-learning process requires a visit to a shop or buying your own TPMS service tool which is also rather expensive. That's why I use external TPMS sensors on my tires now. I also carry a full size spare tire with the car all the time.

 

LOL... There is going to be a surge of PRIUS drivers wanting the TPMS at amazon. I know they are mostly all clones of each other, but some of those external TPMS cost far more than others. Mine is different from the one you posted the link, but basically the same thing. I suspect all of them are manufactured at the same factory somewhere in China. lol

 

My local Costco guys are obviously implementing corporate policy and not just the law. Costco used to sell H-rated (130 mph) summer and all season tires to me for my cars that originally same with V-rated (150 mph) tires and were electronically limited to 150 mph if I signed a release. Now they will only sell summer and all-season tires that have speed ratings equal to or higher than what originally came on the vehicle. When new, our Prius v Five came with W-rated (168 mph) Toyo tires. Isn't that silly? Costco would sell us only W-rated all season tires when the original tires wore out due to corporate policy.

Our Sienna is speed limited to 112 mph but it came with V-rated all season tires and that's all Costco will sell me for the Sienna. Even the Podunk tire store I mentioned that sold me the crap brand tire to replace the ruined one would only sell a tire that had the same speed rating as the tire that came on the vehicle. So it's not just Costco that has rules like that. I find it odd that Costco has no problem selling lower speed-rated winter tires for vehicles but maybe that's also in their corporate policy.

The pressure at which the TPMS warning light comes on is stored in a vehicle ECU for each TLMS ID. I think it can be changed with Techstream but I'm not certain. The minimum pressure varies by model. IIRC, it is 27 psi (22.8% low from recommended) for our Sienna but don't know what it is for the Prius.

I've not bought OEM sensors for Winter tires but I have still bought well known brands - Pacific and Dill. Some people have reported buying sensors on eBay for under $10/each and that they have worked fine.

There is no reason that Toyota couldn't display all the current tire pressures on the dashboard displays of all the vehicles it makes. It has long done that for some Lexus models and has started to do that on some Toyota brand models.

Handheld TPMS programming tools have become pretty cheap. And there are smart phone apps (e.g. Carista) that can do it via a Bluetooth OBD2 interface. It takes only a couple of minutes to program each vehicle ECU with my ATEQ Quickset when I do the winter/summer changeovers. Some people use cloned sensors on their winter wheels so they never have to do the reprogramming but I'm not ready to go there yet.