When should you fit winter tyres?

Or how to survive the arrival of winter without pain to your health or your wallet

There are two periods in the year that the owners and staff of tyre fitters and garages traditionally look forward to, and that motorists remember with dread. These are the first snow in autumn (or early winter), and the first serious thaw in spring. These periods, as a rule, last only a few weeks each, but in that time tyre fitters manage to “earn back” the cost of new equipment, and body shops get months of work ahead of them from the first snow alone. As for the jams caused by minor accidents on city streets, and the kilometre-long queues at tyre fitters, we need not even mention those.

And in reality there is only one cause for all this mess: the irresponsible attitude of the vast majority of motorists towards their own car, and towards their own presence on the road, as road users. And this is not only, or even mainly, about the timing of the seasonal tyre change. As a rule, towards the end of autumn, nature at these latitudes can quite easily “treat” us to a sudden, heavy snowfall, a sharp thaw up to 15-17 °C, or even several rounds of the conditions described above alternating with each other. So what, change your tyres every day? Of course not.

The most important factor affecting driving safety during this period is not so much which tyre happens to be fitted to the car at that moment, but the driver’s sound assessment of the current weather conditions (and how the current tyres behave in them), and (and this is probably the main thing) understanding that, during this period, far from every road user has a tyre fitted that matches the weather.

You can argue at length about how promptly summer tyres should be swapped for winter ones, but in fact you have to take the world as it is. And the world around the ordinary Ukrainian motorist is such that winter tyres appear on most cars within a week or two of the first snow. However much we might dislike that, sadly, it is a fact. And so, whatever tyres are on your wheels, at this time of year you need to keep your speed down, increase the distance to the car in front, and step up your caution and alertness.

So, the blunt question: when should you fit winter tyres?

There are countless rule-of-thumb answers to this question, and many of them are correct. Almost correct, to be more precise. You need to understand that, whatever rule you base your decision on, it is the motorist who decides the date of the seasonal tyre change, and it is the motorist who bears full responsibility for that decision. So, rules are all very well, but nobody has ever been excused from having to think for themselves.

Your main task is to make sure that the very first time ice (or snow) can turn up on the road, your car already has winter tyres on it. And here it is better to play it safe and swap over to winter tyres a little early. That said, you need to understand that in conditions too warm for winter tyres, they wear several times faster and do not deliver the characteristics you need for safe driving. So the answer to “when should you fit winter tyres?” is always a compromise.

The main thing you need to understand: if the tyres you currently have do not match the current weather, you must not drive the car! Not “carefully, just to work”, not “just to the tyre fitter round the corner”, nowhere! If you have already missed the moment when you should have fitted winter tyres, then either wait for suitable road conditions (as a rule, winter does not arrive all at once, and a day or two after the first frost and/or snow a brief thaw usually follows), or call a mobile tyre fitter, or ask a friend to help you take the wheels to a garage. And do not look for any other option: there is none!

And how do you correctly choose the time to fit winter wheels?

Given the design features of winter tyres, their makers recommend fitting them once the average daily air temperature falls to 5-7 °C for at least a week. Some motorists (sadly, they are a minority) take this recommendation on board and “shoe” their cars in winter tyres by the thermometer, although sometimes the “critical” temperature they set is higher or lower than the tyre makers recommend: some swap over when the average daily temperature drops to +12, others wait until it drops to 0.

On the whole, the tyre maker’s recommendation is probably the most accurate rule, one that really should give you maximum safety on the road, because at an average daily temperature of +5, the actual air temperature will usually sit somewhere between 0 and 10 °C, and even if snow does fall it will most likely not stay on the road for long, because by this point the ground and the tarmac have usually not yet frozen down to the temperatures needed to hold snow.

One more benefit of following this rule: the queues at tyre fitters are usually still bearable in these conditions.

Does it make sense to raise or lower the change-over temperature stated by the tyre maker? It all depends on the particular climate where you live, and on your own personal circumstances. For an ordinary motorist in ordinary conditions, it makes no sense at all, because raising the threshold temperature will give the winter tyre significantly faster wear and significantly reduced safety in fast cornering once the air (and tarmac) temperature climbs above 7-8 °C, while lowering the temperature threshold means you run a very real risk of meeting the first snow, and all its accompanying road “delights”, still on summer tyres.

Exceptions to all of the above only make sense in the following cases:

• The car is your livelihood. If you need the guarantee that you can use your car on any day, at any time, you can play it safe and fit winter wheels a little earlier, say once the average daily temperature drops to 10 °C.
• If, in the between-seasons period, you are heading off on a long journey, it is still better to fit winter tyres before you set off. That said, if the ambient temperature during the trip climbs above 8-9 °C, you will have to slow down, especially in corners: a winter tyre is less stable in those conditions.
• If you use the car irregularly and one or two trips to work on public transport do not bother you, you can wait for the temperature to drop right down to zero, but in that case you need to be ready for a long queue at the tyre-fitting shop.
• If your winter tyres are already mounted on a spare set of wheels and you are not put off by the idea of changing the wheels yourself, you can also lower the temperature threshold, but not below zero, because at sub-zero temperatures a summer tyre “goes hard”, its grip on the road worsens significantly, which in turn noticeably increases braking distance and reduces cornering stability.