Best Tires for the BMW 528i Touring Sport

In the rain and heavy but a lot of heavy rain, even with chunks of snow in highway, at 120km/h, these tires fitted in a bmw F11 perform wonderfully.
I did used them a lot in the rain, but yesterday had unexpected encounter with snow and they handled perfect! Really great stuff!

As I'd like to stick to the stock wheels and there is not much choice for performance tires of this size, I picked the Directional 5 without much expectation.

The sidewall is pretty soft and I've to pump up to pretty high tire pressure to support my 5-series weight. Other than that, I have actually got nothing negative to say about the tires.

Dry Grip is as good as PS3 and even though the rubber tends to be on the soft side, it still manages to provide more than enough road feedback and make you feel “connected”. Wet Grip is exceptional and the downside to this is that you tend not to slow much down even under a downpour.

With all these performance, one would expect to pay the price in term of noise but strange enough they are minimal c/o other performance tires. I can't comment on the wear as mine is still pretty new ~8000km mileage.

I am living in Norway, so winters here are not easy. Never had problems with these tires on my BMW E39 528i Touring with automatic gearbox.

Buy again? YES !!

Utter rubbish.
Needed 4 tires a year ago and all I could get at the time was these, being BMW and an odd size I couldn't justify binning tires with good tread on for new ones.

Dry the traction control comes on
Wet the traction control comes on

In the dry there is no progressiveness about them they are always on the limit, they are just dire constantly awful, the sidewalls are flimsy and make the already barge like handling even worse.

The wet is a different matter all together, pull out of a junction to quick traction control is on, go around a roundabout to quick and the back end wants to kick out while the front is understeering towards a kerb, clearing water is crap, honestly they may as well call them Triangle Jesus or Triangle Aquaplaner 5000, because that is all they do, they walk on water and throw the car everywhere, when you're driving at 50mph, the rain is coming down so hard you can barely see 10 feet in front of you and all your car wants to do is become the messiah and plane its way home on a thin layer of water they are down right dangerous.

Honestly these tires should be banned, and I mean banned they are so bad I think plastic wheels would be better.

That said, there is only one good point of these tires, the rears on the BMW considering the amount of times I have had the back end out unintentionally have lasted 20k miles, but the down side of that is the tires hit a point of wear and that is it, sideways city, if you have to stop and turn left or right going up a hill, all there is a bend on a crest expect it to start going wrong quickly.

I can't wait to get rid of these, annoyingly only the rears have worn out, meaning I still have 2 fronts which still have 4-5mm of tread left, only a complete idiot would ask for these to be fitted to the car again, they are not good for the money, no way in hell are they good for the money.

I even took the car around the 'Ring as it was close by when I was in Germany, 60mph around some bends and they were in agony, screeching like banshees.

Pay the tiny bit extra and get some Kumhos fitted at least, but for the love of all things holy do not get these tires, unless you want to end up in a ditch on fire.