For those of us who live in colder climes, there is an ongoing discourse surrounding how best to handle the snow. Whereas some believe that AWD is all they need to handle a low-grip situation, others maintain that winter tires is where it’s at.
YouTube’s Tyre Reviews has taken two Mini Countrymans to Goodyear’s winter weather testing grounds to find out for sure. The two cars are identical according to the channel, with only the color, tire, and driveline choices differentiating them.
The white car has AWD and all-season tires while the black car has FWD and winter tires. This is a useful test in that, in my experience, a reasonable number of people with AWD believe that their all-season tires are good enough. And you can kind of see why.
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The acceleration test proves that all-season tires, in combination with all-wheel drive, provide the car with a much greater ability to accelerate. Jumping the black car off the line, the white Mini wins both acceleration tests easily.
The cars are well matched in lateral grip in the constant-radius turning test. According to the channel, however, the AWD Mini can accelerate away from the FWD one when it wants to, albeit at an angle. That ability to accelerate sideways is one of the great advantages of AWD vehicles, whose extra driven wheels provide extra opportunities for the location and use of grip.
There are, however, a few important pieces of information that demonstrate the advantages of a winter tire. Although it’s only glossed over, the FWD Mini on winter tires stops much faster than the white car on both snow and ice.Indeed, although it can’t come out of the corners as quickly as the white car, its ability to slow down and turn into the corner allows the car on winter tires to complete a small rally stage in effectively the same amount of time as the white car, despite being much slower out of the corners.
And there is a lesson in that. Although AWD does provide drivers with an advantage in the winter, that doesn’t necessarily make it superior. All-wheel-drive may be more fun, but under normal driving circumstances, where the ability to slow down and handle predictably tends to be more crucial to safety than the ability to speed up, a winter tire is still an advantage no matter how many wheels are being driven.
