The Tire Reviews Score, rebuilt

From September 2026 the Tire Reviews Score and the category bars on every tire page are calculated a new way. The tests, the data and the owner reviews behind them are the same. What changed is how a result in one test is compared with a result in another.

Updated October 2026: a category no longer favors tires just because they have subjective ratings; a typing error can no longer shift a whole test; results from groups of tests that share no tire with the rest, such as the North American UHP all-season tests, now count instead of being left out; van tires and UHP all-season tires are ranked among their own kind; and the first and last tires of a small group are no longer scored as if they were the best and worst on the site. On 2 October: summer road tires stopped being rated off road, and the confidence rules began saying how tires scored on owner reviews alone are graded.

What changed

• Category bars are percentiles. A Wet score of 90 now means the tire out-performs 90% of the tires of its season and class we hold test data for. Before, it meant the tire sat 90% of the way from the worst tire to the best tire in the tests it happened to be in.
• Results are compared across tests. Two tires that never met in the same test can now be compared, through the tires their tests share. A tire that finished mid-field in a strong test is no longer marked down for the company it kept.
• Older tests count for less, not older owner reviews. Owner reviews were being aged in a way that lowered the review score itself. Now age lowers how much weight the reviews carry, and never the score.
• A tire is scored against its own kind. Summer, all season and winter tires are ranked among themselves, and within winter, studded and Nordic tires among themselves. Competition, all-terrain, van and UHP all-season tires have their own groups. A summer tire is never rated for snow or ice, and a summer road tire is never rated off road: the gravel or grass leg of an SUV test says nothing about why anyone buys one.
• A high score needs three tests. A tire with fewer than three independent tests cannot score above 8.5, however well it did.
• One component was dropped. A "consistency" term that rewarded being equally average everywhere has gone.

Why

The old category scores were built one test at a time. The best tire in each test scored 100, the worst scored 40, and everything else was placed in between. That is fair inside one test and meaningless between two. A tire that lost a head-to-head against the best tire in the world by 3% scored 40. A tire that won a weak test by a whisker scored 100. And because tests almost never mix seasons, a summer tire's 85 and an all-season tire's 85 said nothing about each other, which a data customer of ours was the first to point out.

The overall score inherited the same blind spot. Being behind the winner was penalised three times over, without ever asking how strong the winner was, and a tire that won its tests in 2016 kept the marks it earned against 2016 rivals.

How the new score works

1. The bridge. For every measured result we fit a simple model: the result depends on the test (its car, surface, speed, weather and field) plus the tire. Because tires like the PremiumContact 7 or the CrossClimate 2 appear in dozens of tests, every test they sit in lands on one common scale. For wet braking, 98% of summer tests are linked this way, and the few tests that mix seasons link nearly the whole catalogue. Only named tires link tests: the unnamed reference tires some magazines include are a different tire each time, so they link nothing. A result far out of line with what the rest of the data predict, such as a typing error, counts for less, so it cannot shift its whole test.
2. Percentages, not points. Measured results are compared as ratios, so "brakes 6% shorter" transfers between a test from 80 km/h and one from 100 km/h. Point-scored disciplines such as subjective handling are compared as they are.
3. Ranking within the group. Inside a category, each kind of measurement is first compared with the typical tire of the group, so a tire is not lifted or held back by which measurements its tests happened to include. Each tire's effect is then ranked among the tires of its season and class, and that rank is the category score you see. The overall score weights the categories the way the site always has, with wet and dry counting most, and snow and ice mattering more for winter tires and for studded and Nordic tires most of all.
4. Knowing what we do not know. Every estimate carries an uncertainty. A tire with one test is pulled toward its predecessor's score, or toward the middle of its group, until more tests arrive. A main discipline a tire has never been tested in (wet and dry, plus snow and ice for all season and winter tires) is assumed average, with full uncertainty, rather than ignored. Confidence, shown next to every score, is how much of the final number the tire's own data decided.
5. Owner reviews. Owner ratings are ranked among tires of the same group in the same way and blended in at 15%, scaled down as the reviews age.
6. The 0 to 10 scale. The rank is turned into a score on a fixed curve, set once from the distribution of scores the site showed before the change, so a 9.5 is as rare as it always was and a 7.3 still means an ordinary tire. The curve does not move as tires come and go.

Reading the numbers

• Category score 90: Better than 90% of the tires of its season and class that we have test data for, in that discipline, across all their tests.
• Tire Reviews Score 9.0 and above: Roughly the top 10% of its group. A 9.5 is the top 3 or 4%.
• Confidence: High: at least three tests, with the tire's own results deciding 90% or more of the figure. Medium: at least two tests and 70% or more. Limited: anything less; expect the number to move as data arrives. A tire scored on owner reviews alone is graded by how much the reviews decide instead: Medium from 35 reviews, High from 135.
• Across seasons: Scores are within class. A summer tire's 9.2 and a winter tire's 9.2 say each is near the top of its own kind, not that they would perform alike on the same day.

What moved

Every score changed a little, because every score was recalculated. This table is live. For the twenty most-viewed tires of the last three months it shows the score under the previous method and under the new one.

The tires at the very top are now spread out rather than tied. Several tires that sat at 9.8 and 9.9 now sit between 9.3 and 9.7, in an order decided by comfort, noise and value, since they are within a few percent of each other in wet and dry.

Tires that were tested only in strong company gain. Tires that were tested once and won a weak field lose their 100s. Tires whose tests are all several years old are re-measured against today's field.

How we checked it

The honest test of a score is whether it predicts a test it has not seen. We removed a test from the data, recalculated everything without it, and asked how well each method predicted the finishing order of that test. On the 2025 Auto Bild summer test the new method, which had never seen the test, matched the actual order better than the old method, which had. The same held for a 52-tire braking test. That check now runs after every update.

What has not changed

The sources: independent tests from the publications we have always used, our own tests, and vetted owner reviews. The categories. The weighting between wet, dry, comfort, value, snow and ice. The scale. Every result behind every score is still listed on the tire page.

Questions

The method is documented in full for our data customers in the tyre.info methodology, and the old and new numbers are both published in the data API. If a score looks wrong to you, tell us; the tire page lists every test behind it.