I decided to buy winter tires for my Cube so I made the pilgrimage to Tire-Land USA in Nichols, NY, a mega-tire dealer that sells tires to other dealers as well as the public. Excellent prices and service. You don't just buy tires at Tire-Land, you get a class in tire technology. As usual I learned a lot.
The dealer tells me they have done several Cubes and have reports from drivers in the Adirondack mountains where it has already been snowing that the Cube isn't very good in snow. In fact he altered his recommendations based on those reports.
The first thing I learned when I showed them the tire size on the car (P195/55 R16) was that Nissan has selected an "obsolete" tire size for the 16" wheels on this car. You can't easily buy an exact replacement off the shelf, and what is available is expensive. The only readily available tires that would fit will have a somewhat different outer diameter making the speedometer inaccurate and mess up the automatic transmission and cruise control a bit. So I chose to get new 15" wheels. That opens up a whole world of less costly tire choices that will have the correct outside diameter.
Once that decision was made I had to go through the tire selection lesson. The guy takes you into one of their truck trailer warehouses and starts his speech.
First you have a choice of tire widths - wide and narrow. Narrow tires give you better traction but tend not to handle as well on dry road surfaces. Wide tires offer a bit less traction but handle like the original tires. I chose wide since even in upstate New York, winter roads are dry a lot more often then snow covered.
Next we go through about 6 piles of tires, and I get a speech for each. The speech covers the brand, design, traction, handling, noise level, wear characteristics and price of the tires in each pile. There is no perfect tire so you get to chose what you think is best for you. Some of the tires have excellent traction but are very noisy. Some are bargains and some are awfully expensive. One pile was described as "the tire we love to sell because it only lasts one season and costs $120". Another had the absolutely worst combination of poor wear, lousy traction, bad handling and high cost. They had a big pile of these. I asked if any one buys them and he said they sell lot of them. I said "who buys these things?" The answer? "Doctors and lawyers." They demand the best which is apparently perceived to be these awful Michelin tires. That shows you how well advertising works.
I got a European tire - the Federal Himalaya Premium studless snow tire - that was designed by Toyo in Japan. It's a new design and is supposed to have good traction and wear as well as quiet operation.
FEDERAL Himalaya WS1 Himalaya WS-I
Unfortunately everybody with a Nissan Cube in the US has had the same problem I do so the wheels I need are out of stock. Not only that but there apparently are no cheap steel wheels that fit this car available anyplace in the US. Instead I had to go with low cost aluminum wheels. The price of an aluminum wheel turned out to be only a couple of bucks more then the steel would, I won't need to buy wheel covers and the appearance should be acceptable. They should have the wheels in a couple of days and hopefully it won't snow too much before then.
Winter Tires
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