I know it's the beginning of July, but I just picked up our new Prius (yup, a 2-Prius family now). It has Bridgestone Ecopia EP20 tires on it. I had such a bad experience with the Goodyear Integrity tires on our '06 Prius (one kamikaze run down our road the first winter was enough to convince me to replace them with Nokian WRs) I have since replaced the WRs (and the 2 WR2s that went on the front after someone in a pickup crushed the right front of my Prius) with Hankook Optimo H727s, which are really good 4-season tires. There's only 1 rating for Ecopias on Tire Rack, so I really want to hear from people who have driven the Ecopias through a winter. Should I be ordering 4 more Hankooks before December?
I drove mine through 2 5inch snow storms and i thought they did fine. I guess it depends on where you live?
Since we the the car last September I decide to run them for the winter and got off luck as we very little snow last year. It all went to US East Coast But this year having probably close to 30,000 km on the tire by November I will look for some winter tires this year
I have always believed in running dedicated snow tires - preferably studded - on every vehicle I own. Even my FJ Cruiser The fact you spread out tire wear among 8 tires instead of 4, means there is little extra cost over 4-6 years. Once a tire has been on the vehicle 6 years, it will have aged to the point where snow and especially ice traction will become dangerous anyway YMMV
