Do you need snow tires in Milwaukee winters? Or are all-seasons enough? (buying, living in)

[motions]

As the title says, if you have to go to work at 7 AM and get back at around 5 PM and travel mostly on the main roads and highways, would you need to invest in a set of snow tires? Or is the salting and shoveling so good and so frequent that you literally don't need anything more than the all seasons?

[everwinter]

What do you drive? We need to know because the vehicles weight, or AWD, 4wd can make a big difference if you need snow tires.

[northbound74]

All seasons get the job done.
They clear the roads off quite well.
Of course, you wouldn't look silly buying snow tires if that's what you want. The tire shops won't mind selling them to you.
Snow tires might come in handy if you're out during a particularly heavy storm and the road crews can't quite keep up, or if you venture off the beaten path a bit. Also, they'll provide a little extra traction if you just have some sort of 2-wheel drive.
We had awd and all seasons which worked perfectly fine.

[motions]

Originally Posted by everwinter

What do you drive? We need to know because the vehicles weight, or AWD, 4wd can make a big difference if you need snow tires.

Just a FWD but it has a 70/30 weight distribution biased to the front which might provide a little additional traction. Relatively light car at around 3000 lbs.

[everwinter]

Originally Posted by motions

Relatively light car at around 3000 lbs.

A new Camry is about 3,200 pounds & I've heard cars in this range do OK in the snow. I drive a compact that is 2,700 pounds & it slides around a lot without snow tires. Of course there's more to it than weight alone.

It's a tough call. If money isn't that big of a concern then go for snow tires. Last winter was terrible & I'm glad I had snow tires on the car for my wife who drove it to work. It was nice to be able to go to sleep peacefully at night after I would hear the forecast that it would be snowing through the night.

Also, what's your experience with driving in the snow?

[motions]

Originally Posted by northbound74

Snow tires might come in handy if you're out during a particularly heavy storm and the road crews can't quite keep up, or if you venture off the beaten path a bit.

Are these snow storms common in Milwaukee?

[motions]

Originally Posted by everwinter

A new Camry is about 3,200 pounds & I've heard cars in this range do OK in the snow. I drive a compact that is 2,700 pounds & it slides around a lot without snow tires. Of course there's more to it than weight alone.

It's a tough call. If money isn't that big of a concern then go for snow tires. Last winter was terrible & I'm glad I had snow tires on the car for my wife who drove it to work. It was nice to be able to go to sleep peacefully at night after I would hear the forecast that it would be snowing through the night.

Also, what's your experience with driving in the snow?

Very little snow driving experience, but have lots of professional race driving experience, mainly in the dry though. Also the car is a VW with their latest XDS+ stabilization system which might help a bit although it's a compact. Money is a bit of a concern though. That said, I could get a set of cable chains if they would help.

[everwinter]

Originally Posted by motions

Very little snow driving experience, but have lots of professional race driving experience, mainly in the dry though.

You'll pick up driving in the snow quick then. The biggest thing with driving in the snow is being patient. Keep the speed down, don't tailgate, don't be over confident. don't break or accelerate hard etc. You probably know this already.

Another factor is what all-seasons you have already. I know Tirerack rates performance for categories such as dry, snow or ice for many tires.

[HyperionGap]

You could look through this thread also.

//www.city-data.com/forum/milwa...l-weather.html

[Valerae]

I've been living in Upstate NY for the past 15 years and am about to move to MKE, you know, for better winters (ha!). I'll probably keep doing what I've been doing though - I love the Nokian all weather tires. I could drive my Civic, and now my Elantra, in any storm so long as there wasn't so much snow that I didn't have the clearance (but no tire will help you with that). They do really well in rainy conditions too.

They're a little spendy but I always have felt safer with them on my car. There are only a couple of places out here that sell them so they're a little tough to find, not sure how hard it would be to find them in MKE. If you call around, you should be able to get quotes before you buy. The place I got mine did free rotations for 25k miles.