Milage is important.
Traction on wet roads is important.
Quietness would be nice, but not too important.
Traction in shallow mud is important.
-Blast, who needs to see which of these are available at his tire place.
Mileage: I'd suggest you reconsider this as an important criteria. IMO the cost factors are going to be negligible in the long haul; and the performance, and hence your safety are much more important. Not saying if all things are equal don't take the tire with better mileage, I just suggest you take the better tire over one with better mileage.
I consider tires a very critical component on my vehicles, and have been on the ongoing hunt for the best A/T for our Jeep GC (now Acura RDX) for a couple of decades. Since we live in the NW, wet performance is also key for us.
The tire I've fallen in love with is the
Bridgestone Dueler A/T Revo, now being replaced by the
Revo 2 (the "Revo" part of the name is important).
Bridgestone was one of the first to start using dual compounds to increase wet weather performance on their ultra high performance summer tires. Likewise, they were one of the first to take their dual compound technology and apply it to A/T truck tires.
I started using their high performance summer tires and found it really worked. The old S02 Pole Position tires (they now have better tires) were some of the first high performance tires that really stuck in the wet. Likewise, the Revos also work well in the wet.
On the Jeep:
On the RDX:
They have medium aggressive tread and are pretty good in most conditions. But be aware, A/T tires as a class are going to have some pretty significant performance limitations in mud.
I've also heard good things about the LTX and Yokohama Geolandar A/T, although I wouldn't pick either of them over the Revos. While popular, I haven't been won over by the BFGs, I suspect they are better in mud, but I feel like the compounds are too hard and you give up pavement -- esp. wet pavement performance. And I live mostly on pavement.
I've run the Pirelli Scorpion A/Ts and they do pretty well, although not quite as well as the Revos and IMO their sidewalls are a bit soft. I've heard the Scorpion ATR, although a milder tread, has traction to rival the Revo.
I've run the Goodyear Wrangler AT and felt the compound was too hard and gave poor wet weather performance. I would not consider them again.
The Wrangler MTR as suggested above, is somewhere between a mud tire and an AT tire. Certainly it is going to work better in mud than any of the suggestions in this thread, Revo included, but your on road performance is going to suffer, and considering you talk about wet performance, I suspect that is important to you.
One good resource would read the ratings and reviews on Tirerack. Of course you always need to take the user reviews with a grain of salt since their is no scientific process other than the benefit lots of data points.
Another thing is to hang out on a 4x4 site for a while and see what tires people like since they are more likely to more critically evaluate tires.
I've hung out for years on
the GC forum of Jeepsunlimited, which is probably a pretty good match since most don't do real hard core stuff with the GC, but they are also more serious about off road performance that most other SUVs.
Good luck!
-john
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