LRR Tire Availability (besides OE Ecopia EP150)

Interesting find! Too bad Michelin doesn't sell the Premier A/S in Europe and thus have a tyre rating for it.

There's not much correlation between EU tyres and U.S. tires as far as models go. Sadly. Too bad we can't get this kind of useful information here.

One more candidate: General Altimax RT43. Very high marks all around at Tire Rack, and found a review from a Prius owner who says that the fuel mileage is good. Price is good too.

nikwax said:

Upon further review (reading a lot of Tire Rack reviews), the Michelin Premier is said to have a severe mileage penalty, and is noisy. Seems to be optimized for wet weather performance.


I'll put forward another candidate: General G-Max AS-03. Ultra high performance all season, LRR per Consumer Reports, good reviews on TR, under $80 per tire.

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I'm running the Premier AS on my Volt, and yes first week or so the range suffered but now it's back to normal. The noise level is way way better than stock Goodyear tires.

Anybody put the BRIDGESTONE ECOPIA EP422 PLUS 185/55 tires on the front of their Spark? Like them? I need new front very soon and am thinking these are the way to go.

I'm also curious if anyone has tried the Ecopia EP422 Plus. I put them on my other car (Escape Hybrid) a couple of years ago and have been pretty happy with them there. No significant mileage hit compared to those stock tires, decent traction, fairly quiet. I'm leaning toward putting them on the front of my Spark in the next couple of weeks.

I am only replacing the front tires and I don't want to have mis-matched tire brands if I can avoid it. Call me ocd, but it would bug me having different tires on the front and back of the car. The rear tires are barely even worn, so I guess I will leave them alone. These Bridgestones are the same brand and look almost the same as the stock 150 tires.... so I am hoping they are good tires. The ratings on tirerack.com seem pretty good overall.

We put a pair of EP422 plus tires on the front and are satisfied. No mileage hit that I can see. Handling and wet traction? Better than the stockers (what could be worse :roll: ) but certainly not high performance. They do play well with the stock rear tires, no issues there at all. If you get these there's no reason to throw away good money (or bad money for that matter) replacing the rears as long as their tread is good.

For as long as I've been driving, and that's longer than I'd care to admit, US automakers have put crap tires on from the factory. Why? Even my Renaults came with Michelins. Oh yeah, money!

emv--Did you put the stock size (185s) on the front or did you use something different such as 195s?

Stock.

emv, are you running a higher pressure in the ecopia 422 than in the 150s? I noticed that the 422s are max 51 PSI while the 150s are only 44 PSI.

I got the 422 plus installed on the front yesterday. The tire shop inflated them to 30. I've been running the 150s at 37 PSI, so I promptly pumped the new front tires up to 40. I may play with different pressures, but if you've already done some testing I'd like to hear about it.

I've only put a few miles on them so I can't say too much yet, but I do think they're noticeably quieter than the stock tires.

I run 37-38 all around (what were they doing filling only to 30???). With other cars I've tried using much higher pressures and found the trade off in comfort and handling just wasn't worth it. The biggest difference I'm seeing is that these are much more stable under hard acceleration. The stockers were a handful.

emv said:

The biggest difference I'm seeing is that these are much more stable under hard acceleration. The stockers were a handful.

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Do you mean less squirm and torque steer?

Zoomit said:

Do you mean less squirm and torque steer?

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Less squirm, yeah, that's a good way to describe it. I always thought that torque steer was more a function of front end geometry - and I've had cars in the past that had plenty of it. In any case, stomping on the throttle (why do I still want to say gas pedal) is less adventuresome now. But make no mistake, these are LRR's not performance tires.

Thanks for the feedback. I might go with the Ecopia 422, but in 195s, when I need to replace my fronts in a few more thousand miles. I'm looking for the slightly wider tire on the front, but generally the same LRR characteristics to match the OEM Ecopia 150s on the rear.

...and they don't make the Ecopia 422 Plus tires in 195/55-15. So back to considering the Michelin Premier A/S.

Again I say, weird they put different size tires on the front and back...... but I guess the engineers had a good reason for it, but I have never seen such a thing from the factory on a small FWD car like the spark. Only thing I have ever seen it on is big-power RWD muscle cars. But I can deal with it.

It appears that the Sumitomo HTR A/S P01 is no longer available in the size 195-50-15. Not even the P02.

Zoomit said:

...and they don't make the Ecopia 422 Plus tires in 195/55-15. So back to considering the Michelin Premier A/S.

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You're in SoCal, do you see any rain? If not, there could be other choices, seems like the Premier is optimized to be a wet surface tire.

I don't get a lot of rain, but I'm up in the hills and do need something that'll handle rain and winter slushy/snowy conditions. The car is at around 11k miles and it looks like I'm still a few thousand miles from a serious tire search. The original tires have held up better than my expectations, which were very low given the available torque and the tire's propensity to chirp.

Basically my goal is to replace the fronts with tires that are 1) 195/55-15, 2) dynamically compatible with the rear originals and 3) do not have a large impact to rolling resistance. The OEM Ecopia EP150 is an easy option but I'm open to other ideas.