Yes comfort is important for ones self but also limiting shock to the chassis and assisting suspension in that sense. Limiting shock loading also assists handling and grip warding against sudden breakaway unless too soft. You are correct I feel that the more expensive premium brands tend to make over all, the best tyres generally though occasional exceptions will occur every now and then and in very specialised markets. Tyre testing reviews are important to read but often put their own slant and bias and we cannot always be absolutely certain that a they are not biased by commercial gain, self interest or by lack of effort being applied to accurate testing by ignorance. I also have an interest in Hi Fidelity Sound and read on line reviews and subscribe to HiFi News Magazine but I am concerned about impartiality generally. Over the years one comes come across gross marketing inaccuracies that are perpetuated and encouraged by the media. One can only guess for what reason unless one may on occasion converse with someone who might have incriminating evidence against a specialist journalist in a particular field of interest. So I try not to be too led but it is difficult. Tyre reviews are becoming more and more complex with the number of fields being assessed but also in the way each field of a review might be weighted. We can be easily persuaded to accept a leading product unless we scrutinise the weighting scores and deliberately either negate them or award our own weighting for a particular section of any test. That is of course if we even accept the way tests are performed. They tend not to be performed in laboratory conditions and are subject to human and natural frailties after all.
I like the Michelin Cross Climate 2. I have used it for a number of years on a couple of vehicles but not yet on the T6 Caravelle 4Motion. On this I have tried Winter tyres, OME supplied tyres, that came with the vehicle from new and BFG AT KO2 tyres which have been on the vehicle for more than a year because the weather has been so bad, as you may know I live off road. What I intend doing is consider strongly to replace the OME tyres with Michelin CrossClimate 2 but at the same size as the BFG AT, that is 255/55R18. I will then just have 2 sets of tyres instead of 3 and loose a set of rims. I have ground clearance concerns here.
