‘All season?’ ‘All weather?’ Tire wars confusing

The first time I can remember becoming aware of tires was in the early 1950s on Hwy. 11 in northern Ontario and being out partridge hunting with my dad.

We’d gotten a couple and were driving east back to our home in Kapuskasing when, just past Hearst, we had a tire blow out.

My dad was a good driver, plus we weren’t going all that fast, so he was able to pull over to the side of the road without consequence. He changed the tire and we were soon on our way.

My dad didn’t use our car after the first snow arrived and he would drive it into our garage and put it up on blocks for the winter. Kap wasn’t all that big back then and you could walk pretty much everywhere anyway.

The folks who kept their cars on the road in winter, if I recall correctly, would put chains around their tires.

Now, although “snow” tires were invented in Finland back in the 1930s, they didn’t start to make inroads into the Canadian psyche until later in the 1950s and by that time we’d moved south to Niagara Falls, which was Florida compared to the Frozen North.

That’s an exaggeration, but my dad didn’t see any reason to purchase snow tires, considering the relatively small amount of the stuff that fell in the Falls. He also maintained that snow tires weren’t any good on ice, anyway.

As mentioned, he was a good driver and I don’t ever recall feeling unsafe.

I also internalized his attitudes and when I learned to drive and began buying cars, I never bought snow tires, either.

But the power of advertising and public relations can often change minds and when the tire companies introduced radials in the late 1960s and then all-season radials in the early 1970s, it wasn’t long before I was a customer. I rode on them for years and years.

I was perfectly satisfied with the all-season tires and never had a problem on dry pavement, or snow, or ice.

But then, a half-dozen or so years ago, I did an interview with the great Canadian racing driver Richard Spenard, who was on the road for Michelin extolling the virtues of “winter” tires.

He told me I was taking a big chance driving on all-season radials (and even some snow tires), not that they weren’t up to the job, exactly, but that they couldn’t do as good a job once the temperature fell below 7 Celsius.

I was (and remain) skeptical. Seven Celsius is 44.6 degrees Fahrenheit, which is not cold. Chilly, yes; cold, no.

If Spenard had told me the radials wouldn’t work as well when the temperature fell to minus 7 Celsius, I might have been more accepting. But everywhere you look (or look up), 7 Celsius is the number.

In any event (see three paragraphs back), I bought winter tires. If Richard Spenard tells me I need them, I believe him.

However, I can honestly say that in the years since, I have not noticed any difference in performance between the all-seasons and the winter tires.

Yes, I have seen the TV commercials and know that in certain situations the winter tires do better than the radials — in stopping distance on sheer ice, for example — but in my real-life experiences, I found them to be the same.

I also believe that some drivers are better than others and able to handle certain situations and emergencies better.

Now the tire companies — or some of them, anyway — are telling me that the winter tires aren’t good enough any more and that I need to install “all-weather” tires.

Hmm. “All-season?” “All-weather?” Sounds to me like a ploy to sell tires.

Question: when is it “all” going to end? nmcdonald@thestar.ca