I love the handling of the low profile tires that are on my 2016 V60 but that comes with a price and that price is a bit harder bump on the roads. Our roads in my State are notoriously known to be bad and nationally known to be bad. My area of the State is exceptionally bad and full of pot holes and badly paved roads. So my wife's bulging disc feels those bumps.

Do I have to use low profile tires?

My S60 had regular tire walls and when turning around in my driveway the tires would rub. Even though I had the biggest stops they would still hit the inner wells.

 

You have a couple options - you can go "-1" and get smaller rims and then size the tire width/profile ratio accordingly or you can use your current rims and go to a narrower tire width and taller profile ratio. The goal is to retain the current roll circumference so you don't mess with the wheel rotations/mph (messing up the speedo/odometer). For example say your existing tires are 235/45-17. You could go to a 215/50-17 (although the 8 in wide rim is wider than recommended for a 215) or you can source a set of 16 inch rims and run 205/60-16s or 215/55-16s. Its not uncommon for people to run their winter tires on the smaller rims (for example on my S40 my summer rims are16s and my winter rims are 15s with the tires appropriately sized. Wheel-size.com is a good resource for matching rims and tires to your model.

 

Thank you for that information.


I bought the car in March, after the winter season. So I am not sure how well the ContiProContact tires will go in the snow.


I know that when I bought our V50 after the first snow, my first visit was to the tire store to get tires better suited to driving in snow. I don't drive in snow where I need Blizzak's but on the other hand I don't want my car to act like a sled.


I also don't want to disrupt the geometry of the tire and have it effect the MPH.