The German motoring association tested inexpensive all-season tires, comparing them to premium-class ones.

List of models tested:

• Apollo Alnac 4G All Season
• Berlin All Season 1
• Blacklion BL4S 4Seasons Eco
• Goodyear Vector 4Seasons gen-3
• Imperial All Season Driver
• Ovation VI-782 AS
• Superia EcoBlue 4S

Winters in Europe are growing ever warmer, which became one of the reasons for the explosive popularity of the so-called all-season tires, which help motorists save up extra time and money on the seasonal tire swap. This trend, of course, could not pass unnoticed by the Asian manufacturers of cheap tires, which, according to some experts, account for 20% of the market.

Test discipline: wet braking

Even though the temptation to save up on the tires is as strong as ever, a lot of people fear that cheap Asian tires are incapable of ensuring even the most basic driving safety, and, in order to test their effectiveness, the German motoring organization KÜS, whose full name reads as Motor Vehicle Monitoring Association of Independent Automotive Consulting Engineers, decided to perform a test of its own, comparing six budget tires to a premium-class model.

The test involved the following tire models: Apollo Alnac 4G All Season (produced by the Indian company Apollo Tyres), Berlin Allseason1 (private brand of Germany’s Keskin), Imperial All Season Driver (a brand owned by Belgium’s Deldo), Ovation VI-782 AS (manufactured by the Chinese company Shandong Hengfeng Rubber & Plastic Co., Ltd.), Blacklion 4Seasons Eco BL45 (one of the brands owned by Sailun), and Superia EcoBlue (yet another Deldo brand — in 2019 it was announced that it would be produced by China’s ZC Rubber). The pool of budget tires was compared to the recently released Goodyear Vector 4Seasons gen-3 premium-class model.

During the key wet braking test the car was stopped from a speed of 80 km/h, and the worst was the Superia model, whose braking distance was almost 10 meters longer than that of the premium-class reference tire. This means that, when driving on the Superior tires, the car’s remaining speed will be 39 km/h, and, if emergency braking was done from 100 km/h, the car would continue driving at about 49 km/h, which can lead to deplorable consequences.

In the lateral hydroplaning resistance test, the premium tires were able to handle speeds up to 80 km/h without losing grip. As for the budget models, at such speeds all of them started «floating» demonstrating understeer so prominent that the pilot simply could not keep the car on the required trajectory.

Budget  All-Season tire test summary KÜS R16, 2020. Places 1–6. Click to enlarge.

A negative impression was also produced by the economy-class tires in the wet handling test, where, according to the experts, they lacked traction already at the start, and generally they did not even come close to the premium tires by any of parameters.

«The results of the tests prove that cheap all-season tires can be fatal in emergency situations. If the price tag is your only consideration when you buy a new set of tires, this is not the case when the economy pays off — the KÜS experts said. — Because when it comes to safety, the tires’ performance makes all the difference. This is why we say that everyone who cares about their safety must stay away from cheap tires.»