The alternative is ti nip down the scrappy and get a couple of spare wheels and fit some really knobbly mud and snow tyres.
Chains can bugger your tires up if you drive on the highway. Haven't seen any for sale for years anyway. Or buy a Subaru.
We had an ambulance down our hill in the snow with them and they shredded to pieces in seconds once they hit tarmac and the wheels spun. Looked useless to me.
Jonathan
Agreed.
Do a Search for 'Snipe', I had no idea there were so many meanings/uses for the word.
Marks and Spencer sell wheels for Land Rovers?
Umm, I take it you did not follow the link in my original post? Or you closed your eyes when the page opened?
And more than one person has pointed out how expensive a set of M&S/Knobbly tyres are - especially when considering this offer.
I was living in deepest Aberdeenshire then:
JGH
That's Feminus Essexus, the well known 'Essex Girl'
No. They dont.
the trouble is the other people who haven't learned to drive in snow.
No. They were cheaper than the worn out Michelins they replaced. M&S feature hard rubber and deep treads and work best on narrow wheels.
As such they don't have formula one grip levels on hot dry tarmac, and neither are they as quiet as 'performance slicks with just enough legal sipes to fool the MOT' that are fitted to performance saloons.
BUT if you are not interested in using the road as a race track, and don't mind a small amount of road hum at 85mph, they are perfectly usable all year round and no more expensive. In fact when I sold the defender with its original M & S tyres still on after 50,000 miles I realised how cheap they were in terms of cost per mile.
A cheap hard rubber M & S tyre is a very useful replacement to put on a family car.
I live in North Yorkshire and STWNFI used to have to drive over 12 miles of untreated moor road every day so know a thing or two about getting about in snow and ice.
Proper winter tyres are fantastic. On snow and ice STWNFI's Forester fitted with Vredestein winter tyres out performs my Land Rover with M&S tyres by a very wide margin, unless the snow was so deep that it built up under the car lifting the wheels off the road! The Land rovers higher ground clearance then helped, but traction was still poor.
I have used chains, and even the easy fit ones shown in the Lidl advert are a PITA to fit. My son lived on an estate with an uphill exit route which was never treated. He bought a set of "Snow socks" and demonstrated how easy they are to fit. They got him (and a few neighbours that he lent them to) out of the estate with no bother providing the snow was not so deep that it built up under the car!
Mike
Winter tyres. Dogs bollocks.
Winter tyres will do it, and will make the rest of the driving safer too.
That is certainly not my experience driving on packed snow in the Black Forest. Proper winter tyres (which are mandatory there), made it like driving on rails. I really wish I had known about them when we lived in Suffolk - there was one corner I would slip a bit every frosty morning.
We will fit ours before we go there at Christmas, and will drive on them until after we get back from the Easter trip.
Many modern winter tyres don't look much like traditional M&S tyres and my winter tyres are cheaper than the summer tyres, although they are still over £100 each. Having said that, you won't lose much by buying the Lidl snow chains and they might work well enough for your purposes.
Colin Bignell
I think the message I am getting is that not all winter tyres are the same as M+S tyres and not all are created equal.
AND a lot depends on whether its dry snow - which you get a lot on the continent - or packed sheet ice, which is what snow that's been driven on gets to be after a few days of freeze/thaw in the UK..
A couple of years ago I started using Winter tyres on my Saab 9-5 Aero (260 HP, Auto, FWD) and it transformed it. With the Summer tyres it was very very difficult to get anywhere on snow or ice but with the Winter tyres the difference is astonishing. The Winter tyres have a lower speed rating but that's not a practical problem; it's also not an insurance issue because they're permitted in the car handbook. I bought 4 wheels from a breaker (not expensive) and ordered the tyres from a place in Germany ("Mytyres" on t'web, I think) for a reasonable price. It takes about an hour to change the wheels/tyres twice a year (I do it around the same time as the Germans have to change theirs) and the only extra cost is a set of cheap wheels. I bought some snow socks but haven't had to use them with the Winter tyres.
Most are H rated = 130mph, although some are V rated = 149mph.
Some insurers do want to be notified that you have winter tyres fitted, although most don't.
I preferred to buy my tyres from my local tyre centre, who have been supplying me for decades. Their price for wheels and tyres was was much the same as buying on the web and they fit them for me.
While I agree with you, where can you buy a set of winter tyres for under £20, which is all the OP is planning to spend?
Colin Bignell
But it doesn't cost any more to have Winter tyres because the Summer tyres aren't being worn when the Winter ones are fitted! The only cost is the additional wheels and I think mine were £80 for 4 ex-Saab alloys, plus a fiver each to get the tyres fitted to them.
In my particular case the Winter tyres (205/55 R16 91H) are the same price as the Summer tyres (225/45R17 94W XL), about £100 each.
Nah! Two (?) years ago now the snow was really bad here . The snow on the pavement was calf /knee deep, progress on that was a mile an hour (or even less at times). Walking on the road was the only way to make any thing like reasonable progress but that involved lots of trying to get out the road whenever a vehicle slithered past as some brave sole decided to try and drive that bit. Selfishly parked/abandoned cars reduced what was (potentially) a two lane road to one lane (Lanark road) . What I did notice was people in big cars etc getting stuck but the old wifey next door in her KA was still putting about.
In terms of distance, even with a bit of snow, walking could have been faster. But walking would not have been viable:-
First bit, had no idea how bad it was. Could drive OK but traffic was solid.
Second bit, motorway, no walking!
Third bit, much delay due to (as soup said) abandoned vehicles, bus right across road, etc. And anywhere that you might have been able to park already had a vehicle parked up.
Fourth bit, find somewhere to park.
Then final walk home.
But until pretty much the end of the trip, I had no idea how bad the next bit was going to be.
Cost per mile of two sets of tyres is not significantly different. But a) there is an up-front cost - of buying extra wheels and second set of tyres; b) you need somewhere suitable to store the second set; c) try buying winter tyres other than in October/November and you can be very disappointed.
Right now I can see quite a few 175/60 R15 winter tyres - mostly Nankang, Linglong, Hankook, Maxxis but a couple or so expensive Continental and Goodyear. But previously when I have looked there have been none actually available - listed, yes, in stock, no.
So twenty quid on Monday seemed (and still does seem) quite possibly sensible.
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