My two cents
I'll put in my two cents here...same as on another thread. I put F1 Eagle All-Seasons when I got my S5 (now more than a year ago). Last winter there weren't any real big storms, or if they hit, it was overnight and the roads were generally cleared by morning. This past weekend was the first "real" test...a mid-day start to a snowstorm that was dumping an inch an hour by the time I got to Westchester at 5pm with the car at the train station, which is at river level and my house is up the hills away from the river. To be sure, I went slow, there was a bit of drift around corners at slow speed, but the only "oops" was a coming up a bit too fast to a stop sign on a slight downslope and it took 10 feet to come to a stop...made it up hills and actually worse, down hills with no more than me holding my breath. I even had to take someone at my house back down to the train station at Ossining, which I wasn't happy about, but I still made it there and back home, even coming to a stop at a traffic light with the front a good 18 inches higher than the back, i.e. on a slope, and the car pulled away smoothly at the green light.
Now, if we got snow like that on a weekly basis all winter long, I'd be looking for snows...but I put the F1s on last year in hopes of saving a bit of money (that felt good this fall as the economy collapsed) and not having to go through the hassle of changing the tires twice a year. Furthermore, I found during the summer that on really wet roads, like during a thunderstorm downpour, I was 100 percent confident of the car's handling...not sure I would have felt the same with summer total performance tires.
Just my two cents.
). I bought the Dunlop Winter Sport 3Ds and had them installed the day of delivery (car was delivered in January 2008):
