Just decided on putting some dedicated snows on this year. At first I thought it would be easy, just go to the store and buy some Blizzak's but after doing some research all I can say is my head is spinning. There are way more options out there than I thought. I live in SE MI and have a 75 mile round trip commute to work. I also snowmobile so I will take the car to northern MI to our cabin. I'm looking for mostly a snow/slush type of tire but 80% of the driving will be done on dry roads.
Here is the list I've come up with so far.
Blizzak WS70
Nokian R (pricey though..)
Dunlop SP Wintersport 3D
I've also heard good things about the Continental Extremewintercontact and the General Altimax Arctic. These last two companies I tend to shy away from, we had horrible luck with a set of Conti Oem tires on my wifes Caliber and aren't General's a very very low end tire company ?
If you've never had snows before, pretty much any snow tire will be an improvement, and you'll love them.
I had Dunlop Wintersport 2D's on my 2000 Golf for 5 winters. Very good tire. Wore evenly and lasted for probably 35k miles. They made a little more noise than an all-season, and were a bit more 'squirmish' -- both are typical of snow tires.
I currently have Continental ExtremeWinterContacts. They are
awesome. They ride just like an all-season without the aforementioned noise or squirm, yet performed as well as the Dunlops snow-performance-wise. I had them on for 10k miles last winter (a few more miles than I normally put on) and didn't rotate them. I wish I had, because when I removed them in the spring I found that the rears were almost like new, but the fronts were ~2/3 worn, and worn sort of unevenly. I will be getting 2 seasons out of these...maybe 3 max. But for the way they rode/handled, I'd go with another set in a heartbeat. That said, I read in another thread here that Conti may be stopping production of these due to low sales....despite the fact that they rated extremely well in reviews.
I also have Continental all-seasons that came OE on my JSW, and I hate them. Noisy, harsh.... Can't wait to get a set of Michelin Primacies on it. But the Conti snows are the bee's knees.