The 2015 winter tyre test season is here, and as usual the German magazine Auto Bild have done an excellent job of giving us an overview of this years contenders.

Testing 51 tyres in 185/60R15, Auto Bild put each tyre through a wet braking test, then took the top 28 tyres through to the snow braking test. Once the snow braking results were in, the magazine combined the wet and snow distances to give an over all result, taking the top 15 tyres through to their full 2015 Winter Tyre Test.

The Results

While there's no huge surprises in the top ten, the Pirelli All Season in eleventh place has once against blured the line between winter and all season tyres. In theory, the all season tyre should be weaker in the snow, and stronger in the wet than any full winter tyre, however the Pirelli All Season was only tenth best in the wet, and beat a number of winter tyres in the snow test!

Nokian narrowly missed out on the top 15 for the for the first time ever, finishing seventeenth with the outgoing WR D3, and Bridgestone were the only premium brand not to get through to the final test but placed comparatively strongly in eigthenth.

As usual, the budget winter tyres prove themselves to be a liability in the wet, with the worst tyre on test stopping a full 16.4 meters further than the best tyre on test from just 50mph, which is around four car lengths and actually larger than the total gap in 2012 and 2014 (14.8 meters.)

Similar patterns

One other point of interest from this test is that the tyres finishing in 45th, 48th, 49th, 50th and 51st all have identical tread patterns. Sadly they weren't tested for snow performance as the wet performance was so poor, but it goes to show that pattern isn't everything in the wet, as 45th to 51st had a 3.4 meter spread.