Cheap but Dangerous
You have been able to read for the past three weeks which tires are currently the best, but with all those tire tests, there are always brands that receive a test rating of ‘dangerous.’ Due to an extremely long braking distance, they, like the poorly performing tires in the ‘braking measurements’ section, are not allowed to participate in the remaining test trials. However, they make it so bad that they receive a red rating. These are the all-season tires that performed poorly this year!
It is better not to mount the worst all-season tires that failed the 2025 all-season tire test under your car. They have an extremely long braking distance, which the specialists at AutoBild measure first for each participating tire.
Braking Measurement on Wet and Dry Surfaces
At the start of each tire test, the first assessment is the length of the braking distance on a wet and a dry surface. The ‘tire guys’ from our German sister magazine do this with thirty or even fifty tires. The twenty best-performing tires in the measurement are allowed to participate in all test components. A large proportion of tires always fail because they do not meet the minimum standards for a braking distance; they receive the predicate ‘orange,’ and then there is always a remnant of the participating rubber that is labeled as ‘red.’ That means that those tires perform truly abysmally in the braking measurements section.
Dry and Wet
The tire testers perform an emergency stop from 80 km/h to standstill on a wet track and do the same again with 100 km/h on a dry surface. The all-season tire is compared to what the average summer tire and the average winter tire perform in the same tests. If the total braking distance of the two measurements combined exceeds 97 meters, the test team labeled the tires as dangerous. This leads to these all-season tires that you should definitely leave behind:
The average summer tire does 45.6 meters in the 80-0 km/h emergency stop on a wet surface and comes to a standstill after 34.9 meters when braking fully at 100 km/h on a dry surface. For a winter tire, those values are on average 54.7 and 42.3 meters. An all-season tire always faces the extremely difficult task of uniting the qualities of both tire types in one tire.
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