Subaru Forester Tyres

I recently changed to Avon ZV5 from Bridgestone RE50s. The Avon tyre seems very assured at sensible driving speeds and driver feedback is a step up, whilst road noise remains low. All this from a cheaper tyre.

The Avon ZV5 also impressed in the heavy snow this week. It's certainly not a winter tyre but allowed careful confident progress to be made on hilly snowbound country roads. The silica in the rubber compound may have assisted here, allowing the tyre to soften as the temp dropped.

Bought these after extensive months of research and to be honest there wasn't a lot of reviews available due to the newness of the tyres, but read enough reviews to know they were worth taking a punt on. Well what a revelation!!! I came off Yokohama C-Drives which in my opinion were an excellent tyre in the wet and dry but the KU-39’s were a whole level above them. In the dry they were really excellent with high levels of grip and very forgiving of over-exuberant cornering techniques. They are near enough to silent and that's comparing them to the Yoky's which themselves are a very quiet tyre. In the dry they hang on like a granny to a handbag and offer extremely high cornering speeds - and give the driver immense confidence. In the wet, they are, if possible, even better. They do stick like the proverbial baby poo to a blanket and offer wet cornering at dry speed times...I have been driving for nearly 30 years and these are easily the best wet weather tyres I have EVER driven on. The braking is prodigious - from 60 km/h in the dry I can pull the car up in literally 2 car lengths and in the wet it’s more like 3 car lengths. Crazy braking that inspires huge confidence when you stomp on the pedal. All in all an awesome tyre and the only downside I can forsee is tyre life - the tyres are a little softer than a lot of tyres and this might mean shorter life - but with a wife and two kids I don't mind that they make the car safer, even if I go through tyres a little quicker. For feedback I have two driving styles - Dr. Jeckle when the wife and kids are in the car, Mr. Hyde when they are not... e.g. drive it like it's stolen... final word on them is a positive one - they have the world’s biggest rim protector on them...it's not a lip, the whole sidewall is recessed, making it extremely difficult for the gutter to get anywhere near the rim edge. Will I buy them again? You bet, especially as I got these for $150 Australian, which makes them the buy of the decade!