WhatTyre Tyre of the Year awards

Tyre of the Year 2023: Michelin CrossClimate 2 SUV is WhatTyre’s overall winner

13 Sep 2023
300,000 tyres, 700 brands and 9 categories later it is virtually impossible to choose and outright winner. But the 2023 WhatTyre Tyre of the Year awards wouldn’t be what it is without, well, a flagship Tyre of the Year. So, a decision must be made, and this year Michelin’s CrossClimate 2 SUV is the worthy winner of our overall accolade. Before we get into the detail of why the Michelin CrossClimate 2 SUV has won, it is also worth setting that particular tyre’s victory in some overall context.
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Tyre of the Year 2023: The Best Supersports Tyres

13 Sep 2023
The sharp end of the performance tyre spectrum is the domain of the supersports or ultra-ultra-high performance (UUHP) tyre. Completely road legal but also designed to deliver superior performance on the track, these products are tasked with the weighty remit of providing a dynamic yet safe driving experience to the world’s most powerful cars in both wet and dry conditions. WhatTyre has identified five supersports tyres that excel at this.
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Tyre of the Year 2023: Top Performance Tyres of 2023

13 Sep 2023
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.
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Tyre of the Year 2023: the best tyres to fit to your electric vehicle

12 Sep 2023
The replacement market for electric car tyres has begun to swell as tyre manufacturers bring new products to the market. These tyres fit broadly into two major categories: models that fit into existing tyre ranges that contain technologies applicable to the demands of electric vehicles (EVs), or brand-new products designed exclusively for EVs. The difference between these two categories could be described as compatible or specialist products for fitment on EVs; however, this sort of distinction runs the danger of undermining the quality of products that have been designed to suit both EVs and internal combustion engine (ICE) powered cars.
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Tyre of the Year 2023: The top 12 SUV tyres 2023

8 Sep 2023
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.
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Tyre of the Year 2023: The top 10 all-season SUV tyres 2023

7 Sep 2023
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.
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Tyre of the Year 2023: the top 11 all-season tyres 2023

5 Sep 2023
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.
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The top 10 winter tyres for your car in 2022

31 Oct 2022
WhatTyre’s Winter Tyre of the Year shortlist gives you the top ten best options to get the optimum cold weather driving experience. The ten tyres selected represent the best the winter tyre market has to offer, according to our newest independent algorithm, Tyrescore 2.1 “Bentley”. The latest iteration of our dynamic tyre rating gives an indicative mark out of 10 to every tyre available in the UK market. Its special formula takes into account tyre labelling grades for safety, fuel economy and noise, and more than 7,000 independent tyre test results.
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WhatTyre Tyre of the Year 2022 – Continental SportContact 7

1 Aug 2022
Continental’s SportContact 7 had been set a high bar to clear by both its predecessor and highly rated competitor tyres ahead of its launch in the second half of 2021. Following the publication of its first round of tyre test results in the first quarter of 2022, it’s fair to say the manufacturer had jumped it with room to spare. As well as winning the major UK accolades and gaining top marks from Auto Bild and Sporttyre, the tyre made an impact with car manufacturers, winning original fitment deals with Maserati and tuning brands like AMG and Brabus. The tyre even won major product design awards in 2022, with the Red Dot Award for Product design and the iF Design Award.
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