Tire Reviews Winter Premium Touring Tire Tests

For the 2025/26 Tire Reviews Nordic Studless Winter Tire Test, I have tested five friction winter tires plus two reference sets (a studded tire and a Central European winter tire) across 21 tests in 6 categories: snow, ice, wet, dry, comfort/noise, and rolling resistance. If you drive in regions with frequent snow and ice, this is the group test you need. All these tires are available to buy in North America and Europe!

Snow tires, studless friction tires, extreme winter tires, nordic winter tires. This category of tire goes by many names, and they have one design goal, to be the very best on snow and ice for harsh winter climates, where studded tires aren't appropriate, or for people who don't want studs.

To find out which is the best, Tire Reviews has taken 7 of the most popular tires available to both the North American and Nordic markets, and will be putting them through a full range of tests, including ice, snow, wet and dry testing to find out which is best at what. Also, to help you understand where these tires fit in the market, I'm also including the very best of the central european and studded winter tires, the Continental WinterContact TS870 and the studded Nokian Happapelliita 10.

For this year's Tire Reviews winter tire test, we've got nine sets of the most popular winter tires, half of which are brand new tires for this year!

As always I'll be testing in the snow, wet and dry, and looking at rolling resistance, noise and comfort, to ensure you get the best overview of all the new winter tires!

Here are the Tire Reviews best winter tires for the 2020 winter tire season.

As usual, all these tires have been picked based on data from Tire Reviews testing, other tests from around the world, and user reviews - think of this as one big meta-analysis of the best winter / snow / studded tires on the market. This video covers European, Nordic and North American winter tires / tires, and covers cars, SUV's and Electric vehicles (EVs.)

Are cheap winter tires safe? To find out, we travelled to Finland, twice, to do snow, ice, wet and dry testing.

All tests were done using two cars, a VW Golf wearing 205/55 R16 tires, and a heavier, larger Volvo S90 fitted with 245/45 R18 tires.