Yeah, I was also under the impression that we were talking regular street cars here, you donât really go mudding or drive over the tundra with a BMW i3, or for that instance anything else with 2wd and a minimum of ground clearance. For the slippery conditions you see with a regular car, mostly snow over pavement or gravel, wide tyres still are bad.
Also, the width of the tyres are unnecessary when it comes to how big brakes you can fit (of course, it still gives some more grip when braking as long as the road are dry), and this thread had the BMW i3 as an example, which appearantly is running 19" rims with narrow tyres, you still can fit as big brakes as you can if you are running for example 245/30R19âŚ
And, it is not really like that it is almost the smallest possible rim that fits over the brakes that is used on every car, there is no problem mounting 15" rims on a W203 C180, still it had 16" rims, and itâs not really the only example in the world.
And yes, I agree that it is not the best example to compare with rally tyres for snow for a street car either, but as @kmBlaine says, it still doesnât change the facts that wide tyres are bad for winter conditions.
I donât understand what everyone is so mad about, you just have to realize that everything on a car always is a compromise, so is the rim and tyre size tooâŚ
I remember a magazine did a test of many different wheel combinations some years ago, using a mk3 VW Golf as the test vehicle, because it could take 18" rims in the wheel wells and still fit 13" rims over the brakes. Of course, they tested wider and lower profile tyres for every step up in rim size. The best compromise for everyday driving was 14" (donât remember the width and profile but quite moderate numbersâŚ) and a premium tyre⌠18" cheap chinese rubber with much lower profile and greater width was worse in every condition than the 13" premium tyre except for slightly better handling on dry pavement, which really was no surprise.