From my experience, a CrossClimate 2 used year-round for 2–3 years can become utterly useless in serious winter conditions, despite looking perfectly healthy and having plenty of tread left. My suspicion is: compound hardens substantially with age, perhaps accelerated by months of summer UV exposure.
Tyres: Michelin CrossClimate 2, 195/65 R15 95V.
Car: family minivan (MPV in European terms).
Location: Central Europe.
Unfortunately, I don’t remember the exact mileage where the tyres started to be unusable in winter conditions, so I can’t provide much hard data. But the tyres were 2–3 years old and still had plenty of tread left — significantly more than the 4 mm legal minimum here for winter tyres.
After 2–3 years, in proper winter conditions (no mountains, just lowlands, but snow and some ice), they didn’t simply become “a bit worse”. They became genuinely dangerous. Braking performance was extremely poor and steering grip was so weak that I simply could not trust the car on snow or ice.
What I really don’t understand is why these tyres receive so much praise, not only from technical magazines — where I can understand it, since they presumably test brand-new or relatively young tyres, and those really are very good — but also from ordinary end users.
I’m done with them. I won’t buy CrossClimates again.
I can see how they might be useful for someone doing very high mileage and replacing them every two years, ideally before the winter season. But if the expectation is that a set of all-season tyres should provide dependable winter performance for several years, my experience with CrossClimate 2 has been long-term failure, also even I had been very amazed after the first winter by the very good winter performance of thy tyre.