TYRE TEST - WINTER TYRES & DUNLOP'S WINTERSPORT 4D

At long last, British motorists are waking up to the benefits of Winter tyres, arguably the biggest aid to road safety during our colder months. Jonathan Crouch considers their benefits and puts Dunlop's WinterSport 4D tyre to the test in frozen Sweden

It's the same every winter. Cars in ditches. Calls for more gritting. Queues at pathetic speeds on the snow. Another year. Another generation of motorists inadequately prepared for the season.

We live in a time when we'd all better start taking the colder season a bit more seriously. Evidence across the last decade shows a clear trend for winters becoming more severe and unpredictable. It isn't up to the council to keep our cars on the road during the arctic months: it's up to us.

How do we cope? By all going out and buying SUVs and 4x4s? Not necessarily. Even if we could all afford to do that, it wouldn't necessarily solve the problem. There are, after all, plenty of circumstances where an ordinary Ford Fiesta will cruise easily up an icy slope that would defeat a Land Rover Discovery - if the little Ford was on the right tyres.

And that's the key of course - as every racing driver knows. Get your choice of rubber wrong and you can have all the power and technology you want but it's not going to help very much. In the central European and Scandinavian countries that are permanently snow-bound in winter, they have no option but to understand this. For these people, bolting on a set of winter tyres in the freezing months, then swapping them for a more appropriate Summer set when Spring breaks through is as natural as filling up with fuel.

It'...