7500kms done on these tires, including one Leh Trip, I think its time to pen a review.
First a little background.
As some of you may remember, I had lots of issues with my bridgestone HTs. I do quite a bit of driving on very bad himalayan roads, and also go offroading, and the bridgestones were not upto the mark.
I lost 2 tires, one to highway blowout, other due to a bulge.
I replaced these with JK Elanzo, which turned out to be pretty useless, and developed internal cracks too.
So the solution was All Terrain tires.
There were numerous candidates.
First on my list was BFG All Terrain TA/KO. Since I wanted a rock tolerant tire, I decided to steer clear of Yoko Geolander AT as quite a few people into heavy offroading had reported sidewall failure and suck. Moreover the price of 6300/tire was a bit steep.
But as luck would have it nobody had BFG in stock, as it was replaced by Long Trail. So michelin was offering only LTX, which was even more expensive.
So the only remaining candidates were MRF wanderer, Apollo Hawkz RT and AT, and the continentals.
The Apollos seemed pretty non AT-ish from the tread pattern. Ditto for wanderer, the tread was pretty highway like.
So decided to take the pluge, and get the Conti's
The cost per tire was around 6100, and I got a set of 4. However I got a good exchange price on the old tires.
Now lets come to the review part.
1. Looks
You either love them or hate them. The reason is the ribbed sidewall gives the impression that you are wearing truck tires. So some are really put off, some love the look. The sidewall lettering is white(as with all premium tires), but don't be too happy. Even few seconds in dirty trails will make them brown.
The main tread is pretty aggressive though!
2. On road performance
Now this is seriously mixed bag. On dry tarmac they are good. If you are enthusiastic on the curves of smooth tarred roads, they will scream loud, but not lose grip. Braking is also decent.
However on wet tarmac, they will not make you happy. I would rate them at par with the hard tires like cheap JK or Apollos.
They will skid easily, and the braking distance is definitely more than the bridgestone HTs
3. Off road performance.
This is the reason the tires were bought, and all I can say is that they did not disappoint at all!
Okay. I had slimed them, but slime protects only against nails, not sharp rocks
These tires have spent most of their lives traversing really bad roads, and hard core offroad rocky terrain, and they do not break a sweat.
The sidewall does not have any strange bulges etc., and the main tread offers excellent grip on rock crawling.
Many times when I was navigating sharp rocks on 4L in 1st gears, these tires clung on and did not let go at all.
The terrain these have been subjected to would have made shredded my older tires.
So all in all they have performed par excellence!
To sum it up, a purchase well made. The tread still looks like new.
Hoping that they last me atleast 50K kms more!