What Are Non-Studded Tires?

Today, most vehicles come equipped with all-season tires. While these tires can provide great performance in spring, summer, and fall, they can become ineffective when winter approaches. If you come from a place that experiences very cold winters, you should consider investing in good winter tires. The two types of winter tires you can buy are studded and non-studded tires. The non-studded winter tires are mostly preferred because they do not cause much damage on the roads. Studded tires are shunned in most areas because they can dig up roads if they are not covered up in snow or ice and deface them completely.

Back in the day, winter tires majorly relied on protrusions in the tread to provide excellent performance on the wintry roads. But things have changed nowadays because the new non-studded tires lean on advances in tread designs, rubber compounding and other modern technologies to provide efficient performance on the challenging winter roads. Their benefits are closely related to those of studded winter tires. In fact, the recent non-studded tires tend to have more benefits compared to their studded counterparts. They also have the advantage of being allowed in most areas.

In winter when the temperatures become too cold, the tread rubber of a non-winter tire becomes so stiff and less able to conform to the irregularities of the snowy roads. When you fit modern non-studded tires on your vehicle, you will not have a hard time driving your car in these conditions. These tires are capable of maintaining flexibility on the road even in freezing temperatures because of the advanced rubber compounds that they are made of. The increased rubber flexibility that they feature allows them to maintain good traction control on icy, snowy, wet as well as dry driving surfaces.

A quick glance at the non-studded tires and you will notice that they have broader tread depths compared to their summer and all-season counterparts. The deep treads allow them to manage slow and slush dispersion is coming from under the tires. This, in turn, allows the tires to provide better snow-on-snow traction by packing the snow within the tread blocks. You will also notice thousands of slits called sipes on the non-studded tires. These sipes act as biting edges on ice that help with acceleration and braking.

Click here to help you understand more about non-studded tires, visit Nokian Tires today.