Nitto Motivo All Season 245/50ZR17 99W Passenger Tire

I tried these tires because Subaru cars are not sound insulated well and the Michelins that came on the car were making enough noise to test the limits of the stock radio. I also needed decent all-weather performance for my Colorado 4 season driving conditions. These have been the quietest tires I've put on my WRX so far! Even my carpool buddy commented on them. The natural under-steer of the WRX is not abated much on dirt or sandy roads; but performance on dry pavement seems better than other all-season tires I've had on this car. Wet performance was good enough to allow in-corner passing of other mountain commuters. Snow performance is about as expected from all-weather tires, fair, with braking on ice not being very good. Surprisingly, acceleration and hill climbing in the same conditions is good enough to inspire false confidence... so leave some extra room for stopping, especially on hills. I drive about 100 miles per day, with 12 miles of that being on washboard dirt roads. On the dirt, I adopt Colin McRae's motto of "if in doubt, flat out", and retired my Motivos at ~40,000 miles with little tread left and plenty of rock damage. Overall, these were great non-winter tires for the daily commute around Pikes Peak, and serviceable tires during the winter months. Spirited driving will result in increased tire wear; so if you like to hear your tires "talking to you" in the corners, expect to only get about a year's worth of driving from these.

I've had these for 43k miles. They're very quiet, which is why I will definitely buy them again, and why I recommend them to everyone when they can actually find them!!! They handle amazingly well in the dry or rain. Hydroplaning is rated 7 out of 10 by me. I only had problems maintaining the (70mph) speed limit once, on a Florida panhandle interstate in the middle of a complete downpour, my OEM (loud, but otherwise fine) ContiPros were better at only that when they were new. These are a firm riding tire, which aside from them not being astonishingly good at hydroplaning, is my only non-10 score. It took 35k miles for the tires on my bent rims to get loud after the tire place finally decided to rotate them to the front. They evidently never rotated them for the first 40k miles, even though I took them in every 5 - 7k miles. Still, I'm pretty impressed with their treadlife, the rear ones are pretty much bald now, but the front two are at somewhere around 6/32" left. I'll be replacing these 225/45r17 with a 225/50r17 Nitto Motivo when I buy new rims to replace these bent ones.