awards

BMTR Birmingham has become Pirelli’s Performance Centre (PPC) of the Year and 4x4 Key Dealer of the Year. The two awards recognise the tyre retailer's "commitment to excellence" and its "outstanding" automotive service,. Pirelli said. This is the fifth time BMTR has been crowned PPC of the Year. Its Birmingham store is the flagship of the network and Birmingham’s largest retail tyre warehouse, according to BMTR.

With budget brands now accounting for 38 per cent of 17- and 18-inch tyre purchases in the UK, it is more important than ever to recognise products that deliver the handling and stopping performance required by executive and performance saloons. To identify our favourite Performance Tyres of 2023, WhatTyre has looked at the three most popular sizes for 17-inch and larger rim diameters, 225/45 R17Y, 225/40 R18Y and 205/45 R17W. As was the case in 2022, this year we have separated tyres aimed at the highest echelon of the performance car world into their own category – Supersports Tyres.

Motorists continue to choose the space and high visibility seating position offered by SUVs. In fact, they are so popular that many new cars have adopted looks leaning in the direction of SUVs. That inclination has created the CUV (crossover utility vehicles) and impacts the 2023 WhatTyre Tyre of the Year rankings because we have to define what an SUV is for the purposes of this category. Building on the platform formed by the previous two years of WhatTyre Tyre of the Year awards, this year we have tightened up our judging criteria to create a more robust and competitive 2023 award. We began by filtering our database of around 300,000 tyres based on the three leading SUV tyre sizes according to market research specialists GfK. From here we filtered products according to their Tyrescore – our market-leading bespoke tyre comparison system – requiring all short-listed tyres to score above seven out of 10 or above in both one of the three key sizes and across its range as a whole on average. We then interrogated the results according to the following further criteria: category appropriateness; specialist category tests and require relatively recent third-party magazine tyre test results.

Drivers want mobility all year round. In the past, that meant changing tyres for the winter months or compromising on noise and comfort with an old-school all-season tyre. Not so anymore. As we have seen in previous years, the latest generation of all-season tyres offer impressive year-round performance without the downsides. But does that description apply in the all-season SUV tyre niche? In order to find out, we started with the bespoke Tyrepedia database that powers WhatTyre.com. Tyrepedia features data relating to more than 700 brands and 340,000-odd different tyres. We filtered our database according to three top SUV tyre sizes, which this year were: 235/60/18, 215/60/17 and 235/55/19. Accreditation such as the three-peaks-mountain-snowflake (3PMSF) marking helped show winter performance too.

With winters feeling colder and summers apparently getting hotter each year, all-season tyres are making more sense than ever to UK drivers. While many stick with summer tyres, which are optimised for higher ambient temperatures and are less adept when things get slushy frozen, years of technological advance mean no-one can deny the advantages of all-season tyres in autumn and winter conditions. And what’s more, the leading tyremakers have spent years of time and millions of dollars mitigating the summer-time downsides of all-season tyres. Gone are the days of the stereotypical noisy all-season tyre which is sub-par in summer. Now, all-season tyres offer an attractive year-round solution. Here, WhatTyre ranks the current all-season tyre market leaders in terms of performance, to help you find the best tyres for you. At the same time, as well as flagging up the best-performing tyres out there, we also use our wide-ranging performance, OE and ESG data analysis to help highlight value champions in each category of the 2023 WhatTyre Tyre of the Year Awards.

Mercedes-AMG is fitting 18-inch Continental SportContact 7 tyres to its C43 model. Designed for speeds of up to 186 mph and bearing the XL marking for enhanced load capacity, the tyres also carry the M01 sidewall marking, which appears on all the tyres specially developed for AMG. Continental developed this UUHP (Ultra Ultra High Performance) tyre specifically for vehicles with sporty attributes as well as for super sports cars.

Supercars may turn heads and hog the social media limelight, but it’s an army of humble hatchbacks and saloons that keep the country moving. These underappreciated vehicles need tyres that are all things to all people, delivering safe and efficient performance in a range of conditions and at an acceptable price. The summer tyre, we salute you, and in this category of the WhatTyre tyre of the Year Awards we celebrate the best of the bunch.

Building on the in-depth research we did on the top 15 tyres in the SUV segment, we have also produced a ranking of the best all-season SUV tyres out there. The basic principles upon which the earlier research was based carry through to this project. SUVs are increasingly popular vehicles to drive and the most popular tyre sizes in the general SUV market are the same for all-season tyres since there are no replacement wheels involved.  

Big is beautiful for tyre makers. Recent analyst reports tell us we can look forward to continued growth in the market for UHP tyres, with 17” and 18” and larger rim diameter sizes each expected to account for more than 50 million tyres sold in Europe annually by 2025. This means these larger rim diameters should account for a quarter of the region’s overall replacement tyre demand, with their proportion of total sales even higher in markets such as the UK.