Winter tires recommendation

Midnightsky228 said:

Canadian winters generally mean black ice at one point or another, what do you want on your vehicle when that situation occurs? Tires with studs? Or tires without studs? I generally encounter black ice 4-5 times per winter here in Western Canada and every single time I am very glad I had chosen studded winter tires. I will be running Pirelli Winter Ice Zero Studded this winter in a 205/55/R16, was quoted $800CND installed including tax/GST ect. Will be acquired wheels hopefully this coming weekend and the tires near the beginning of November, we already had a dump of 10-15cm this past Monday with nasty 90km/h North winds blowing snow drifts all over the roads. Several highways we closed due to significantly reduced visibility, about 10m of visibility was reported on many of the surrounding highways. Conditions like that warrant the need for proper studded winter tires and thus I have been using them successfully for many years now.

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If you live in rural areas and studs are legal, ok. I live in southern Ontario and studs are illegal. So for the OP, 205/60/16 is the recommended size and if studdable tires are legal in your area with lots of ice during winter, you can go that way. But if your in the same boat as most people, ie more snow, city driving with not very good plowed streets, than non stud tires are the way to go.
But its your choice which ones you need. But I will echo, do NOT cheap out on winter tires. And make sure you know where your tires are made and what the expected life span is, ie 3-4 winter seasons. I made the mistake of not doing enough research on the Bridgestone LM-32s. At new they had a depth of 12/32. I bought them last year, by March of this year and only 6000 kms driven on them, they were down to 8/32.
I discovered in talking to a couple of tire shops, Bridgestone cheaped out on life expectancy. They acknowledged what they did and sold the first generation of those tires at half price. So I know I will need new winter tires sometime in February. For me, I will be looking at these:
Firestone Winterforce 2
General Arctic 12
Pirelli Ice Zero FR
Gislaved Nord Frost