Originally Posted by earossi

I will second all the positive comments on both Tire Rack and the Continental tires. Have had a set on my 545 for 15k miles and they are still quiet and are wearing very slowly. Significant improvement over the RFT's that were fitted to the car previously. The RFT's handled better, but were significantly harder riding, wore fairly quickly, were extremely noisy, and are prohibitively expensive to replace. Since my 545 has a standard sized spare, there was no incentive to buy another set of the Dunlap RFT's. My memory says that I have only had one flat tire in the last 100k miles, so running RFT's is very expensive insurance.

Currently, the Continentals are extremely highly rated by Tire Rack surveys. And, are significantly less expensive to the #1 rated tire. A good trade off for me. I focused on the four season ratings and noise, which were both very highly rated in the surveys. Living in Chicago where we typically deal with snow falls of about 2 to 4 inches, I find the Continentals to be the best handling 4-season tire I have ever owned. In fact, they appear to handle as well as a set of winter tires I ran on a Mercedes several years ago.

I also typically over inflate all tires I fit to my cars (from the factory specs). Usually by +2 PSI. You sacrifice a very small amount of ride comfort (honestly can't tell you that I can perceive the loss), but gain in fuel mileage and handling usually improves. That has been the case with the Continentals.

If you use Tire Rack, have the tires shipped directly to one of their recommended installers and the installer will honor the installation costs listed on the Tire Rack website; so, using the site allows you to shop pricing on installation with no surprises. I've purchased about 15 sets of tires from Tire Rack over the years for everything from SUV's to BMW's, Mercedes, to my Porsches.......all from Tire Rack. Never a negative buying experience.


Good luck.