Top Pick Tires: Best Car, SUV, and Truck Tires

Most mainstream cars and small SUVs can use all-season tires, the most common tire type. All-seasons are known for balanced performance, long tread life, and relatively low cost, making them a good option for many drivers.

Sports cars, sporty luxury cars, and some performance-tuned SUVs wear ultra-high-performance (UHP) tires to make the most of their power and road-hugging suspensions. These tires are specifically designed for serious grip in any season, with significantly better handling, more responsive steering, and higher levels of grip in wet and dry conditions than regular all-season tires. The compromise is that UHP tires typically sacrifice ride comfort and don’t last as long as regular all-seasons. For those who are comfortable with those trade-offs, the top UHP all-season tire is the Michelin Pilot Sport All.

All-season SUV tires are mostly engineered for modern crossovers, aka midsized SUVs. The design of these tires is between regular all-season car and compact SUV tires, and tires made for larger trucks. They’re tuned for the performance, ride comfort, load capacity, and light-duty towing needed from this category of two- and three-row vehicles.

Good all-season truck tires perform well in most conditions, and they’re specifically designed for the rigors of a full-sized pickup truck or SUV, and in the sizes intended for trucks. Specifically, these tires are engineered to support the heavy payloads and trailers these larger vehicles are capable of moving.

All-terrain truck tires are engineered for some off-road use, with a rugged tread designed to provide good traction whether they’re holding on to pavement or clawing through loose dirt. But all-terrain tires typically have slightly less grip in braking (both dry and wet) and lower handling limits than road-focused tires. Many of these pricey, tough-looking tires also bring noise and rolling-resistance compromises.

Winter/snow tires offer superior winter grip. In cold and snowy weather, they can go, stop, and take corners better than other types of tires. The trade-off is that winter/snow tires will wear faster than all-season tires because the rubber used is formulated to stay pliable at freezing temperatures, and the tread is designed to prioritize grip in snow and ice over longevity. Most winter/snow tires don’t carry a mileage warranty and are intended only for seasonal use, so we don’t include their tread life in our assessments.

Every year, Consumer Reports purchases, installs, and tests more than 40 tire models for cars, SUVs, and trucks. In this extensive program, we test about 800 tires every 12 months.

We evaluate them at our track in Connecticut for wet and dry braking and handling, ride comfort and quietness, and resistance to hydroplaning—when water gets between the tire and the pavement. We do our snow-traction tests at our Auto Test Center and in northern Michigan. Ice-braking evaluations are performed at a skating rink. We also commission outside labs to measure each tire’s rolling resistance, which affects fuel economy.

Our testers run extensive 8,000- to 16,000-mile treadwear tests on public roads in western Texas. The results from those real-world tests are used to predict tread life, enabling us to offer buying advice based on actual miles driven, instead of relying on government ratings or manufacturer promises.

• Best Tire Brands
• Best Tire Values
• Best Car Tires
• Best SUV/Truck Tires
• Best All-Season Tires
• Best Winter/Snow Tires
• Most and Least Satisfying Tire Retailers