Winter tires
 

Being the fact these cars are available in AWD, does anyone bother getting snow tires for their car, and if so which ones do you recomend?

i just use all-seasons on the audi and i'm from canada where it gets cold and snows alot. i just installed a set of conti extremecontact DWS on her and they're awesome.

for the golf i just installed a set of conti extremewintercontact winter tires. they're great too. both tires get great reviews from tirerack.com.

I also got the Conti ExtremeContact DWS couple of weeks back(though it
doesn't snow where I live - CA).

Have been pretty good so far, have good grip even in tight turns(the OEM was
Goodyear which had lesser grip). But since I changed the tires, I have
had to press the gas pedal harder to get it moving. May be I'll let it
settle down for a while.

If you had the 235 45 17's on the car, did you keep the same size for snows, or did you go to a 205 55 16 size tire? The Audi winter tire selection seems to recommend -1 sizing for winter tires for those of us with 17's on the car.

maybe they recommend that size because i know you can't buy those cheapo black steel wheels for the 17" size.

Over here in Germany Audi sold me some Pirrelli P210 Snow Tires which are pretty decent. I had to go through some serious snow drifts and a minor blizzard last winter. They performed excellent. They also gave me at costs some really good looking Aluminum "16 rims with the 205 55 16 tires. I wanted the cheapo steel black rims, but Audi told me they did not have them because of my brake size?

Anyway got the Alu rims for the cost of the steel ones!

so the brakes are the reason. "i'm sorry, we don't make the cheap wheels for your car because your brakes are just too awesome to fit the wheel around." you know you have a special car when..

Well I do not know about awesome, but that is what the Audi Rep said. The brakes size for the US spec'd 2.0T was larger than the German version. Hence the reason why they had no steel rims to fit it. He said the calipers/disc size was the same as the S4 (B6). Since they quoted me a price with rubber for steel wheels and could not deliver, Audi made good with the Alu's for cost of the steel rims. Not bad I say.

Audi does have winter tire packages with aluminum rims, that fit the A4. The ones recomended are the 16" rims. There are also 17" aluminum rims available, but they are not listed for the A4. Don't know if it is because they don't have the right offset or what. I did notice that the price for the 17" package was way more than the package for the 16" rims. It might be the fact that narrower tires are better for going through snow. Maybe Audi is trying to help you out by selecting winter tires that have more traction over all seasons, and that are narrower, so they move through the snow easier. The narrower snow tires are not so great for dry handling, but then your buying the narrower snows for winter snow traction not dry handling.

I agree. I was looking for cheap black 16" steel wheels with winter tires (due to traction) and got the 16" Alu's instead. It was a win-win for me!