Today in unnecessary tires

"gogmorgo - rowing gears in a Grand Cherokee" (gogmorgo) 02/01/2019 at 21:30 • Filed to: None

3

11

Only a small size difference.

And yes, the white lettres went out because obviously.

Okay so they’re not totally unnecessary. One of the highways locally requires the severe-snow-mountain-peak- snowflake-whatever tires, and the old ones weren’t . And if I hadn’t already been a believer in the winter-rated tire, I would be now. Traction wasn’t necessarily bad before, but in 2wd now it’s about what it was in 4x4 . These also far exceed what I got out of the KO2s on my Jimmy, which were frankly a joke in the snow. With the TrueTrac sitting on my shelf waiting to go in, this will make for a pretty unstoppable daily driver.

The ride is a little firmer now, and even in the snow I can tell acceleration has dropped somewhat, although the lengthening of gears has meant first is a little more useful on the street now than it was before, although my mpg likely will tank . But  also they seem to have corrected my speedometer error. So there’s that.

JeepJeremy > gogmorgo - rowing gears in a Grand Cherokee 02/01/2019 at 21:39

1

oh yes!

facw > gogmorgo - rowing gears in a Grand Cherokee 02/01/2019 at 22:32

1

You keep calling the letters white even though they are blue?

gogmorgo - rowing gears in a Grand Cherokee > facw 02/01/2019 at 22:57

1

I’m just  too lazy to scrub the blue stuff off them. It'll be gone on its own soon enough. 

Dogsatemypants > gogmorgo - rowing gears in a Grand Cherokee 02/01/2019 at 23:20

0

I was thinking about getting some grabber at3 s for my spare rims. The other tire i am looking at is by falken. My plan was to stick with stock sizing to retain grippyness. How do they compare to k02 in less snowy patches? I tend not to get much snow, but like to go into the mountains and want something that can handle white stuff.

gogmorgo - rowing gears in a Grand Cherokee > Dogsatemypants 02/02/2019 at 00:22

0

Less snowy as in bare pavement, or as in an icy patch? They seemed alright on the couple icy patches, but there’s no bare pavement to be had out here right now after a day of snow , and with another four or so days of snow in the forecast, probably I won’t see any bare pavement at all for a while.

The KO2s were pretty good off-road on the Jimmy, but I wasn’t happy with them on the road. I lost traction on wet pavement more often than I’d expect out of a siped , and they were pretty well junk on snow and ice. It’s not like I wore them out either, probably they only had 7000 miles on them when I sold the thing. The Jimmy was likely 500lbs heavier than the ZJ, or at least it feels that way, so traction should have inherently been better . On snowy roads w ith the Terras on the ZJ, I ran in 4x4 to avoid one-wheel-peels with the open diff, and now I don’t really need to do that. On the Jimmy with the G80 diff and KO2's I ran in 4x4 in the snow because I couldn’t stop the ass end from stepping out in 2wd, and regularly had horrendous understeer just on wet pavement.

I can’t speak to how these perform off road in “ summer” conditions because I haven’t experienced that, but the previous generation of these, the Grabber   AT2, I found to be pretty good, not far behind the KO2, so I expect these to be similar. Cold weather driving though, these spank the KO2. The ATx is also studdable, and I don’t remember that the KO2 was, but I’m not a fan of studs anyhow... no real enough advantage to outweigh the pavement destroying tendencies or traction reduction on bare or wet pavement.

The one selling point to me about the KO2 is they’re available in a 33x10.5r15 which is what I would like to run on my 4x4 MJ, but if you want a 33 in the ATx you’re stuck with a 12.5-wide. 33x10.5 is getting harder to find in any tire now. But otherwise my experience was mostly that the KO2 didn’t seem to live up to the hype.

It’s worth pointing out that these are branded as Grabber A/ T X in Canada. We don’t have a Grabber AT3 listed anywhere, but the AT3 on other market sites looks very similar. I don’t really know why they’d brand the same tire differently in different markets, but the Canadian site does put more emphasis on the winter aspects of the tire so it could be there are small differences somewhere. I suspect thought that  they just changed the name to avoid confusion with the Cooper Discoverer AT3, but I really don’t know.

Dogsatemypants > gogmorgo - rowing gears in a Grand Cherokee 02/02/2019 at 06:31

0

I dunno if atx and at3 maybe have slightly different compounds maybe?

Dogsatemypants > gogmorgo - rowing gears in a Grand Cherokee 02/02/2019 at 06:42

0

Jinkies, a clue!

https://www.generaltire-tyres.com/car/news/2016-09-01-grabber-at3-x3

Which One looks most like yours?

Dogsatemypants > gogmorgo - rowing gears in a Grand Cherokee 02/02/2019 at 12:59

0

I am thinkinn g more wet or frosty. I dont get real snow where i live, or at least havent since i was a kid. Global warming=bc stealing all my snow

gogmorgo - rowing gears in a Grand Cherokee > Dogsatemypants 02/02/2019 at 13:14

0

Mine’s definitely not the X3. That one’s a totally different animal all together, loosely based on the original Red Lettre Grabber, but adapted for more varied terrain than just desert sorts of environments the way the original Grabber was.

I messaged a little bit with a guy who worked for continental tire a couple years back. He sent me a photo of some new tires they were working on at the time.

He only discussed the three in front, and not in much detail. The third back is “the Arctic tire”, the second back is the X3, and the one in front is supposedly a C ontinental AT that we didn’t really talk much about. It was shortly before continental announced the x3 and at3 together in late 2016, for a 2017 launch . The ATx didn’t launch until early 2018 though, which would make sense if they had to change all their North American moulds to rebrand as ATx.

The European and Australian websites have the AT3 listed, which looks an awful lot like the A/Tx on the North American pages. The Oz site is a bit more navigable, given to dig up specs on the euro site you need to convert the inch sizes to metric to find stuff... mine are 267/76r15... yeah. But then it pulls up the 31x10.5 size so I dunno. But I wasn’t able to pull up much hard data on any page for real comparison. Euro tyre grading and labelling doesn’t seem to do that. Tread wear ratings should exist, you’d think, but all I’m getting is dimensions and load and speed rating, some sort of mpg rating (a lettre grade, the at3 gets an E or F), a noise rating (76dB at I don’t know what speed) and a wet performance (B). I didn’t find hard data on the oz site. The nex t step I suppose would be to try to find hard data through a retailer website, but I’m not really finding I care enough to keep digging. The two don’t really seem to compete in any market. The one thing I did notice is the A/Tx is available in a slightly broader range of sizes than the AT3, specifically there are more inch size options, which makes more sense for a US market vs elsewhere.

I like the tires though. 

gogmorgo - rowing gears in a Grand Cherokee > Dogsatemypants 02/02/2019 at 13:19

0

Well...

That’s what it looks like here now. Currently -21°C, which is  comparatively warm still. If we get wet or frosty at some point and I remember to let you know, I’ll try to.

atfsgeoff > gogmorgo - rowing gears in a Grand Cherokee 03/02/2019 at 22:59

1

Love that meaty sidewall, mmm