Tires Pirelli or DUNLOP

I don't shave tires, and I ran 150+ runs and a few thousand street miles easily on my Z2s last year. They still have life left in them.

I have lived in the snowiest city on earth (Valdez, AK) as well as the UP of Michigan and now in Maine and I've always used the Dunlop Winter Sport M3's with great results. I will keep using these (or Winter Sport 3D for larger wheels) as long as they make them.

I am running Dunlop wintersport 3D's on my Mk6 GTI and regularly take it through some really nasty stuff to go skiing here in CO. I will likely buy Dunlop winters again. They are my first winter tires, but they seem to perform well. They are on their 3rd winter, I think, and they still mange to get me around just fine. The only times I ran into issues was when I was trying to go up steep grades from a stop on very slick roads, but that is more to do with the lack of AWD than the tire. They also perform well in the dry, even on some of our testing mountain roads here.

If you don't have a lot of actual ice and snow, the Dunlop Wintersport tires are fantastic. They're like a performance winter tire. I've had Nokian, Toyo, Bridgestone, Michelin, Dunlop - all have pro's and con's but for performance the Wintersport tires have been far superior as they still have excellent dry weather grip for aggressive driving.

These I am running on my 7 R actually (225/40/18) and had them on my 6 R as well for the last winter. I can highly recommend this tire cause it's good in wet and snowy conditions and in addition very 'sporty' (for a winter tire) if you have dry conditions in winter. Probably the best winter tire I ever had.

Ended up ordering the last set of Pirelli Sottozero 3s in the country from tire rack. I'm getting them installed today.

I put over 40k on my p zero tires with the mk6, I know people dog then but I was glad to get them again with my mk7.

I had a set of Dunlop SP Sport tires on the Sentra a while back. They were good in the dry, decent in the wet and sucked ass in the cold.

I had Pirelli winter tires on my '11 Tiguan. They sucked right from the get go. No traction.

Skip the P-zeros, I hate mine. There's so much road noise I feel like the tires are made of cement sometimes.