Last week I replaced OE Conti Pro Contact which still had decent thread left but were uncomfortably noisy with General Altimax RT43 and boy what a difference in ride quality, handling and incredibly quiet.
The General Gmax AS-05's perform extremely well. The Michelin's are still top dog don't get me wrong, they have better braking, lateral grip, as well as wet grip, but if you want 95% of the the AS 3+'s and save (usually) a couple hundred dollars on a new set of tires the AS-05's are my pick.
I just ordered a set of General Tire G-MAX AS-05 for my Bolt. With 28,000 miles of wear on the factory tires, I can feel it starting to hydroplane in heavy rain. I'm swapping before something worse than "starting to hydroplane" happens. And I'm looking forward to it being a *lot more fun* to drive.
I'm running the older Altimax Arctic on my 06 Legacy wagon and the new Arctic 12 on my 17 CX-5 awd. Agree 100%. They are excellent all-around winter tires, but far from a performance winter tire.
I have the Generals on my jetta. I don't think they're as good as the Michelin MXV4s that came on the jetta (those tires were the greatest in the world). But they are close and for half the price.
So, my buddy has a Mk2 Supra. He has so many cars, this one lives at my house. When he first bought the car 4 years ago, it had been sitting for a while, and the tires were shot, so he had tires-easy send a set of Nexen N3000's in close to the original size to North Carolina, had them installed so that he could drive back to Pittsburgh. So, we took the car to Hershey at the beginning of last year, and the tires have not covered that many miles since purchase, so three years of mild summer driving. They started to vibrate BAD after we started back. At first, we could not figure out what in the hell was wrong, so we stopped, and the tire had a HUGE bulge in the middle of the tread. Once again, in the middle of the tread. So, we had to throw on the 30 year old spare, a Dunlop SP3000 that looked comically old. So we started off again, and less than 10 miles later, it started to vibrate terribly again. Thinking that the spare was dying, we were stuck in a single lane cattle pen on the PA Turnpike, and were limping it at 35 until we could get to an emergency pull off. We were just about to pull it over after it crossed back over to the end of the construction zone, and BLAM! We pulled over to find the OTHER N3000 on the rear axle had **** the bed, actually blowing out the center of the tread. It looked like the belts had all just blown out of the hole. We had to wait 6 hours for a tow truck for a 4 hour tow home. It sucked. He found a couple of used tires at a place down the street from him, some old Grand Am brand tires to tide him over until he could replace all of them with a decent tire. So, after a couple of shows and sitting at my house again, I took it to Youngstown to get snow tires for my wife's new Fiesta, about an hour away, and........WHOOMP WHOOMP WHOOMP....the third out of four started to bulge in the middle. So on went the old Dunlop spare, which got me home. I wouldn't buy Nexens again if you paid me, and I had N5000's on my truck for a couple of years, kinda liked them. BUT NEVER AGAIN.
