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.
Michelin CrossClimate 2 wins all-season Tyre of the Year for the second time in a row
Michelin CrossClimate 2 – Photo Michelin / Frédéric Le Floc’h / DPPI
Last year’s all-season Tyre of the Year winner, the Michelin CrossClimate 2, has done it again. 2023 marks the second year straight that Michelin’s flagship year-round product has beaten all-comers. Set in the context of the tyre’s history, that’s not really surprisingly. The Michelin CrossClimate 2 builds on the pioneering heritage of the original CrossClimate, which led a sea-change in the philosophy behind all-season tyres when it was launched back in 2015. For many years, the tyre industry had produced winter tyres on a philosophy that assumed an all-season tyre should basically be a winter tyre tweaked for year-round performance. That generation of products generally performed well in the snow, but for the majority of drivers snow was the exception rather than the rule. Michelin worked the other way and produced a tyre that performed in the majority of spring, summer and autumn circumstances and could achieve the three-peak-mountain-snowflake (3PMSF) winter tyre performance accreditation. Michelin’s R&D department built on that platform with the CrossClimate+ and the latest-generation CrossClimate 2 continues to impress.
Specifically, the CrossClimate 2 offers some of the best label ratings out there in this category, with the 205/55 R19 97 V version coming in at AB69 for wet grip, rolling resistance and pass-by noise respectively. That’s between one and two label grades better than the 10 other worthy products in our top 11. The range also offers the best average WhatTyre Tyrescore across the range and the second best individual performance we sampled. However, if this year’s richly-deserved winner had any drawback it is the unsurprising reality that you have to pay for market-leading quality.
Highly Recommended all-season tyres
The Goodyear Vector 4Seasons GEN3 is another previous winner that continues to shine. Not only did the Vector 4Seasons GEN3 win the all-season Tyre of the Year category in 2021, it also won overall Tyre of the Year 2021. The fact that the Vector 4Seasons GEN3 scored the highest individual performance out there and is one of only two ranges able to achieve Tyrescores north of 8 in the whole of the top 11 serves to emphasis just how elite this product is. To put that data into perspective, scores of that magnitude would likely make it onto the top table of summer tyre category! But it is not just performance that the Vector 4Seasons GEN3 offers, it also does so at some of the most competitive price points out there, averaging half the price per performance point than first-placed Michelin. For many, all of that will be a convincing argument to choose Goodyear’s tyre over the winner.
Bridgestone’s A005 Weather Control DriveGuard EVO is also worthy of commendation. Not only does it compete with the best tyres out there, achieving those scores with W speed rating and at least one A-grade on the tyre label, it also does so as part of Bridgestone’s DriveGuard range. DriveGuard is what Bridgestone calls its all-vehicle run-flat technology. Passing over such an important detail would fail to recognise the added complexity of offering a top-performing all-season tyre and fail-safe drive-you-home-when-flat failsafe technology. Rather, with the DriveGuard technology in mind, Bridgestone offers one of the most impressive go-anywhere, mobility securing tyres out there.
8 more Commended all-season tyres
While the top three positions are filled by renown global market leaders, Finnish-based tyre manufacturer Nokian continues to punch above its weight in terms of tyre development and production with the Nokian WeatherProof. The first of two tyres in our top 11, Nokian’s Weatherproof is one of just five products that were able to achieve a TyreScore over 8 in the key size we sampled.
The Continental AllSeasonContact takes fifth place this year. Not only is it the only other tyre in the 2023 all-season tyre ranking to achieve a key size TyreScore over 8, but it was only 0.06 points behind fourth position when the whole of its wide range of tyre sizes were taken into account. In other words, there was hardly anything in it. And what’s more, as we compiled this year’s rankings Continental released the AllSeasonContact 2. Billed as “an enormous step forward”, the AllSeasonContact 2 comes to market in a launch range of 99 sizes and will be available in the UK from July 2023. It is too early to feature in the range of third-party magazine tyre tests necessary to rank on this year’s table. However, with the predecessor hovering around fourth-to-fifth position – the AllSeasonContact 2 is likely to challenge for a podium place in next year’s ranking.
Pirelli’s Cinturato All Season SF2 once again occupies sixth position, two places higher than it ranked in the 2022 table.
Hankook Kinergy 4S 2 H750
The Hankook Kinergy 4S 2 H750 is another tyre offering wide-ranging all-season strengths. Indeed, as we went to press, its was named Auto Express 2023 Product of the Year Winner following similar 2022 and 2021 all season Tyre Test Winner accolades. Auto Express highlighted this achievement by stating: “Hankook is now firmly established among the premium brands and this second victory on the trot for its all-season Kinergy 4S 2 is no surprise”.
Eighth position went to the Vredestein Quatrac with the brand once again showing out is winter and all-season strength. For example, it is worth noting that, when the Tyrescores of their respective complete ranges were taken into account, the Vredestein Quatrac scored just 0.03 points behind sixth position.
Nokian’s SeasonProof takes ninth position, Nokian’s second slot on the ranking this year. Not only does that represent a good showing for the Finland-based tyremaker, but the SeasonProof range was also one of the most consistent we tested, meaning you stand a good chance of experience very similar levels of performance whatever size you fit to your car.
The BF Goodrich G-Grip All Season 2 comes offers another solid showing in general all-round, year-round performance. It is also the exception that proves the rule. It was true to say the Nokian is the brand is the only name with two products in the top 11. However, Michelin can also lay claim to something similar because the BF Goodrich brand is part of the Michelin stable and, therefore, along with this year’s winner – the CrossClimate – the BF Goodrich G-Grip All Season 2 means the well-known French tyremaker has two products at the top table.
Falken AS210 EuroAllSeason
The Falken AS210 Euroall Season remains a really impressive bookend to this year’s ranking. Make no mistake, coming 11th is no wooden spoon. We surveyed from a pool of 300,000 products and some 700 brands to get here. Just being in the top 11 amongst such a large universe of tyre is worthy of commendation. However, while the Falken AS210 EuroAllSeason does offer top table performance, it also offers incredible value. Indeed, the range costs just £8.46 per point of Tyrescore value on average, which is less than half the cost of its most expensive competitor. And that’s why the Falken AS210 EuroAllSeason is this year’s WhatTyre All-Season Tyre of the Year Value Champion 2023. And what’s more, in May 2023 Falken released the Euroall Season AS220 Pro, which suggests the brand will have an even stronger showing in next year’s awards.
How we chose the winners
“Why produce a top 11?”, you might be asking. That’s because only 11 products met our strict criteria for being shortlisted. With that in mind, here’s a brief run-down of how we made our short-list.
As with all our categories, we begin with the European tyre label which gives us a strong baseline for comparison.
With over 300,000 individual tyres in the WhatTyre.com database, we began by filtering out the all-season product according to our own classification. Next, we focused on the two top sizes in the UK (205/55 R16 and 225/45 R17, according to the latest GfK data) plus a larger rim size to reflect the increasingly high-performance nature of the market (205/55 R19).
All the tyres we shortlisted had to achieve a tyrescore over 7 in their best result of those three. And they also had to score above 7 on average across the whole range. On this point, credit where credit is due, those manufacturers with larger size ranges deserve extras plaudits for consistency across a large number of fitments.
We then entered these sizes into the WhatTyre.com database. The latest incarnation of our TyreScore system takes into account original equipment performance at the vehicle manufacturer level as well as the environmental and sustainability performance of each brands’ parent manufacturer in order to further differentiate the products.
Having done all that, we were able to compile a list of the top 11 all-season tyres currently on the market – all of which are worthy of commendation.
