Premium Mobile Tyres, Supplied and Fitted Where You Are
Michelin, Pirelli, Continental, Bridgestone, Goodyear, Dunlop and Yokohama, supplied and fitted at the roadside, on your driveway or at your workplace. Give us the size on the call and that is what goes in the van. This page explains what the extra money buys, and when it is not worth spending.
What the Extra Money Actually Buys
A tyre is the only part of your car that touches the road, and the patch doing all of the work is roughly the size of your hand. Steering, braking, holding a line through a wet roundabout: all of it happens through four of those patches. That is the whole argument for premium tyres, and it is worth being specific about where the money goes rather than leaving it at better rubber.
The first place is wet braking. A premium tyre is generally built with a more developed tread pattern and a compound designed to hold grip as water gets between the rubber and the road. Stopping distances in the wet are where the difference tends to show up most clearly, and it shows up at the one moment you can do nothing about it.
A car pulling out of a side road on a wet evening. Standing water on the A31 after an hour of rain. Nobody notices a good wet tyre on a dry Tuesday. You notice it once.
The second is how long the tread lasts. A premium tyre often wears more slowly than a cheaper one, which changes the sum you are doing. The gap on the invoice is one number. The gap per mile driven is usually a good deal smaller, and on a car that covers serious mileage it can close almost entirely.
That is not a promise, because wear depends on how you drive, on your alignment, on your pressures and on what the vehicle is carrying. But if you are the sort of driver who wears tyres out rather than ages them out, cost per mile is the honest way to compare, and it flatters the dearer tyre.
The third is noise. Road noise is the drone you stop hearing on a familiar journey and notice straight away in somebody else's car. Tread pattern, block sizing and construction all feed into it, and premium ranges are usually where the development work on quietness has gone. On a coarse motorway surface that is the difference between a conversation and a raised voice.
The fourth is rolling resistance, which is simply the energy a tyre wastes deforming as it rolls. On a petrol or diesel car it shows up in fuel consumption, slowly, over a long time. On an electric car it shows up as range, and that is a great deal easier to feel. EVs are heavy, they deliver torque instantly, and they tend to wear tyres faster than the equivalent petrol model, so a low rolling-resistance tyre with the right load rating is doing two jobs at once.
There is also no engine running to cover tyre noise in an EV, so a loud tyre on an electric car is a loud tyre all of the time. Some manufacturers specify tyres developed for electric vehicles for exactly these reasons.
The Label Is Not Marketing
Three of those four things are graded on a label, and that label is the reason most of this does not have to be taken on trust. Almost every new car, van and 4x4 tyre has to be labelled before it is sold, rating the tyre on rolling resistance, on wet grip and on external noise, and the label has to be put in front of the buyer rather than left in a drawer.
The tests behind the grades are set down in law and run the same way for every maker, so a grade on one manufacturer's tyre means the same thing as the same grade on another's. One qualification worth being straight about: those figures are declared by the tyre maker under that test regime rather than measured independently on every tyre, and they are policed by spot checks afterwards.
Even so, it is the one part of tyre buying that is genuinely comparable, and it is not written by an advertising department.
Rolling resistance and wet grip each get a letter on a scale running from A down to E, best to worst. Noise is given in decibels along with a class, so a quiet tyre can be picked out at a glance. There are separate icons for tyres certified for severe snow conditions and for ice. Two tyres in your size, set side by side, can be told apart in a few seconds this way.
What the label leaves out is worth knowing too. It says nothing about how long the tread will last, nothing about dry grip or handling, nothing about how the tyre behaves once it is half worn, and nothing about ride comfort. A tyre can grade well and still not be right for your car. So use the label to narrow the field, then ask about the rest.
Ring with your size and you will get the grades on what we can supply in it, along with a straight answer about what those grades do not cover.
When Premium Is Not the Right Answer
Premium tyres do not repay themselves on every car. The clearest case is the low-mileage second car: the runabout that does the school run, the shopping and not a great deal else, a few thousand miles a year at most. Its tyres will very likely reach the end of their life on age rather than on wear.
Rubber hardens over time whether the car moves or not, and the week it was made is stamped on the sidewall. A tyre that comes off with plenty of tread left never delivered the longer life you paid for, and cost per mile, the argument that makes premium look sensible, quietly stops working.
The same goes for a car that is being sold in a few months, one that is genuinely near the end of its life, or a spare vehicle that sits on a driveway most weeks. In those cases a well-graded mid-range tyre from a maker who knows what they are doing is a perfectly sound piece of engineering, and the difference is better spent elsewhere on the car.
Where premium does repay itself is more or less the opposite list. High annual mileage. Motorway miles, particularly in the dark and the wet on the M27 and the M3. A heavy vehicle, a loaded van, or anything towing. An electric car, for the range and for the quiet. A car you intend to keep for years.
Drivers who cover a lot of miles in poor weather get the most back, and they usually know it already.
One thing that is not a matter of budget at all: keep the two tyres on the same axle matched. Same size, same type, ideally the same tyre. Putting a premium tyre opposite something quite different on the same axle changes how the car behaves under braking, and that matters more than any grade on any label.
If one tyre has failed and the other three are in reasonable condition, we will say so rather than sell you four. If they are not in reasonable condition, we will say that too.
The Premium Brands We Stock
We stock Michelin, Pirelli, Continental, Bridgestone, Goodyear, Dunlop and Yokohama, and we fit them at the roadside, on driveways and in car parks across Southampton, Hamble-le-Rice, Winchester, the New Forest, Salisbury, Bournemouth and Chichester. To be plain about it, we are an independent fitter. We buy these tyres and we carry them. We are not appointed, approved or endorsed by any of those manufacturers, and we do not claim to be.
The badge on the sidewall is only half of the information anyway. Between them those makers build a great many ranges: touring tyres aimed at quiet mileage, performance tyres aimed at grip and steering response, all-season patterns, and lines developed specifically for vans and for electric vehicles. Most of the seven cover most of that ground, though not every maker builds every kind of tyre and not in every size.
Which range suits you depends on the vehicle, the miles you do and the roads you do them on, far more than on which of the seven names is stamped on it. There is no single best brand, only the tyre that suits your car and the way you use it.
Tell us the size when you ring. It is on the sidewall of what is fitted now, a run of numbers and letters such as 225/45 R17, with the load and speed rating after it. If you cannot read it in the dark, give us the registration instead. That is what decides which tyres go in the van before it sets off, so on the call it matters more than almost anything else you can tell us.
If the exact tyre you are after is not something we can supply, you will hear that on the phone rather than at the kerb.
We carry mid-range and budget options as well, Nexen, Hankook, Firestone and Kumho among them, and you get the same straight answer whichever shelf the tyre comes off. That is what the section above on when premium is not the right answer is there for. The recommendation follows the car, the mileage and the roads you cover, not the badge.
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Michelin
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Pirelli
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Continental
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Bridgestone
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Goodyear
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Dunlop
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Yokohama
Questions About Premium Tyres
Which premium tyre brand is the best one?
There is no honest answer to that in the abstract. Each of the seven makers we stock builds several different ranges, and a touring tyre and a performance tyre wearing the same badge are aimed at completely different drivers. What decides it is your vehicle, the size, load rating and speed rating stamped on the sidewall of what is on the car now, the miles you cover and the weather you cover them in. Tell us those and you will get what we can supply and what the label says about each option. Then you choose.
Can premium tyres be fitted properly at the roadside, or is that a garage job?
It is the same job, done with the same equipment. A fully equipped van carries dynamic wheel balancing, so the wheel goes back on balanced rather than approximately, along with EV-safe low-profile jacking, heavy-duty jacks for commercial vehicles and locking-nut extraction sockets. The jacking points, the balancing and the torque setting on the nuts are all part of fitting a tyre properly, and none of them get skipped to keep the van moving. It does not have to be an emergency, either. A great deal of this work happens on driveways and in workplace car parks, and we run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Do I have to replace all four tyres at once?
No. If one tyre has gone and the rest are in good condition, one tyre is what you need. The thing to watch is the pair on each axle, which should match each other in size, type and ideally in tread pattern. If you are replacing two, the usual advice is to put the newer pair on the rear, because a vehicle with less grip at the back is harder to hold if it lets go on a wet bend. We will show you what we are looking at, explain it, and leave the decision with you.
The car barely gets used. Should I still buy premium mobile tyres?
Probably not, and we would rather say so on the phone than at the kerb. On a car covering a few thousand miles a year, tyres tend to come off on age with tread still on them, which means the longer life you paid for never gets used. Wet grip still counts on any car in any weather, so it is worth looking at that grade rather than at the price alone. But if the choice is between a premium tyre and a well-graded mid-range one on a low-mileage second car, the mid-range tyre is often the sensible buy.
Tell Us the Car and How You Use It
Give us the tyre size off the sidewall or the registration, say where the vehicle is and roughly what mileage you cover, and you will get a straight recommendation and a figure on the call, before anybody sets off. Abu Bakar or a skilled mobile technician then heads over in a fully equipped van, to the roadside, your home or your workplace. You pay when the work is finished and you are ready to drive away, never before we arrive, by card terminal taking contactless, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Visa and Mastercard, or by bank transfer or cash. One thing to raise on the call: if your wheels have locking nuts and the key is lost or damaged, getting them off is extra work and a charge may apply. We quote that before we set off rather than adding it at the end.
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