Quote:
Originally Posted by Secure
It's the area of tire in contact with the ground, when it comes to snow you want to reduce it. The higher the PSI to the ground the better. An aggressive snow tread is important as well. I would want to keep the car as far away from road salt as possible. Our cars always turned into swiss cheese driving in northern Wisconsin.
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Close, but not quite.
For a given vehicle, and a given tire pressure, any tire (wide or narrow) will have the same area of footprint. The PSI to the ground is the same as the PSI inside the tire. What does vary is the shape of the contact patch. A wide tire will have a wide but short contact patch, while a narrow tire will have a narrow but long contact patch. They both have the same static ground pressure. Dynamically, the shapes matter because the wide tire has a longer 'leading edge' and is always climbing up out of the rut, while a narrower tire puts more of the contact patch in the rut.
Having said all that, old technology winter tires only really drove at the edge of the tread, so the narrower tire had much more traction. Modern winter tires are designed to grip across the tread, so it is possible to have wide winter tires that perform. Even two years of design evolution makes a huge difference in winter tires.
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