Obviously, whether you roll on one, two, three, four or more wheels, your tires are the most critical of all components when it comes to staying in contact with the road in a manner that helps you control said vehicle. You do everything on them after all, and the better the rubber the better acceleration, ride, handling, braking, and just basic motivation in low traction situations. Without exhaustive testing (which I do not have the resources to accomplish), all I can tell you is I stumbled on some really decent all-season passenger car tires recently that are worth mentioning. They come from Nokian, and the Finnish concern (and I’ll let you ferret out if they’re related to Nokia, the phone builder, or not.) is best known in the US for their excellent snow tires. But they have recently built an all-season tire specifically for the North American market, built in a new state-of-the-art facility in Russia. This is a very interesting hoop indeed, for not only does it have all kinds of performance features it’s designed to be an unusually green tire. 

I first encountered the eNTYRE, as it’s called, by accident when I was inspecting a used compact SUV I ended up purchasing. Naturally one of the things I inspected carefully was the tires, and shod as it was with what looked to be a fresh set of the new Nokians I realized I knew next to nothing about the company and whether or not their products were any good. There are a lot of tire makes out there, which makes buying these days a bit more involved. After I did a little research I was intrigued, and after I purchased the vehicle found them to be pretty impressive performers. They are quiet, deliver good traction in rain, snow and dry conditions and transmit good feedback. They also have a very cool feature that I hadn’t encountered in tires before (although I’m sure there must be more manufacturers that do this), which is a centerline tread wear indicator system that literally tells you how many millimeters of tread you have remaining, including a special water droplet indicator that tells you when, if this symbol is no longer visible, you have lost the tire’s excellent ability to avoid hydroplaning. It’s very simple, yet a really great tool to keep an eye on tire wear. There are a boatload of other features to these tires, but I’ll spare you by not outlining them all now. The bottom line here is there’s a lot here to digest which is pretty amazing considering these are just big rubber things that hold air, like other tires. 

As for the green side, the eNTYRES have low rolling resistance which has seemingly been verified when I purchased additional set for our Hybrid, and it continues to deliver exemplary mileage. Nokian is also proud to point out that these tires are made using purified compounds, or as they put it, “the eNTYRE is manufactured using only low aromatic, purified oils. These purified oils keep Nokian’s tires from polluting the environment as the tire gradually wears down.” 

This endeth my purely unscientific review of these tires. I really like them so far, and when they wear out plan to acquire another set for both vehicles. They have also been affordable; the only problem is they can be tough to find but I’ve got an excellent tire dealer not far from me that carries the entire (or eNTYRE) Nokian line. Very nice shoes, and worth a look.