Time to put the snow tires on my '00 300m

In case anyone wants to know a good combination of snows for a 300m:

Front: Cooper Discoverer M+S 215/70 R 16 Rear: Bridgestone Blizzak WS-50 205/70 R 15

This will be the third or fourth season for that combination. The front shock tower guard clears the Cooper's by about 1/4 inch. The Coopers are technically an SUV/light-truck tire.

Yea, they put the speedo off by a little, but they've also pulled me down some roads where the snow was so deep it was scraping the bottom of the car (and I took my front air-dam off a few years ago).

Still running on the original battery. 10 years 1.5 months old and still crank'n.

No snow on the ground around here yet. Been really lucky that the lake-effect snow has totally missed us.

Reply to
MoPar Man
Loading thread data ...

Not needed here, even though I climb mountains to ski. Good all seasons do the job, the 300M traction control makes it a bit easier. BTW I wouldn't use a different tire on the rear, the same all around is recommended for best handling.

Reply to
Josh S

Yep, it's winter time, and it's the time when I get used to habitually pressing the big round traction-control button to cancel it ever time I pull out of my driveway. The most useless feature on my 300m (the next-most useless feature being auto-stick).

My tires can't act like mini-snow-blowers as I turn corners and get up to speed with TC turned on.

Since I don't exactly drive like Mario Andretti during the winter, handling is not exactly my primary concern.

Going to 15" rims is the only way I'm going to put 205-width tires on the 300m (and it can only be done in the back). In the winter, having wide tires is a liability. Few people seem to understand that...

Reply to
MoPar Man

It may be more trouble than it's worth to you, but you could put a power-up one-shot timer with contact closure output on that TC wire to automatically turn it off at startup.

Reply to
Bill Putney

I'd be more worried about mixed-sized tires confusing the ABS, personally.

Reply to
Steve

For one thing, ABS systems don't compare wheel-speed differences between wheels or use that info to modulate the braking of individual wheels (there are too many variables that could cause rotational speed differences between wheels during an emergency or panic braking situation for that information to be useful). Only the wheel-speed data of individual wheels are used as feedback to those same wheels.

Second, if the over-all tire height is kept close to the original OEM height, the wheel sensors won't know if you're riding on 15, 16 or 17" rims.

Third, it's not so much that ABS is relying on the fact that your tires should be a specific over-all diameter for a given car as much as it's looking at the rate-of-change of rotational speed during braking and attempting to prevent that rate from reaching a point where lock-up is imminent. When you're working with measurements such as radians-per-second, the tire diameter doesn't even factor into that.

Reply to
MoPar Man

That I did not know - I always thought they compared rotational rate of the wheels - kind of determining an average speed of the wheels and looking for variations of an individual wheel outside of a moderately wide tolerance band (to allow for normal variations during turning, etc). Your rate of change explanation makes sense.

Actually they won't know if you vary from the overall OEM height. Maybe you mis-stated what you intended to say. Your next paragraph seems to correct that.

Reply to
Bill Putney

If your OEM rim is 17", and the OEM tire-diameter is 26 inches, then you can also get 26" with 15" rims and an appropriately-sized tire. In either case, the hub-mounted wheel speed sensor wouldn't know if you had changed the rim size because it will still measure the same rotations-per-mile in both cases.

Some cars do (or did) make use of differences in rotations-per-mile between tires as a way to indicate to the driver that a specific tire might be losing air pressure. If a given tire is generating a higher R-P-M reading than it's counterparts, then it's likely that it's losing air pressure.

It would be nice if the computer inside the 300m would use that simple technique. Even the 300C does not use that method (relying on more expensive sensors built into the wheel).

Reply to
MoPar Man

wheels or use that info to modulate the braking of individual wheels

I don't believe that is true. The software allows for rotational speed differences up to a certain limit, but the only way it can tell if one wheel is locked is by comparing that wheel's speed to the other wheels. Using mismatched tires means that you're closer to the allowed limit even when the wheels are rolling normally.

True, but the DIFFERENCE in tire diameter does matter. If the overall circumference is within a few percent, then you're fine.

Reply to
Steve

AIUI, ABS braking systems check each wheel's rotational speed separately, looking for a sudden rotational deceleration that indicates that that wheel has locked.

Perce

Reply to
Percival P. Cassidy

Unless the car's computers are looking at GPS data (maybe there are some cars that do that, but the 300M definitely does not), there is no way that it knows how fast the car is going. It's *ONLY* info. about how fast (in mph) the car is going is based on what it thinks it knows about the tires size (i.e., whatever pinion factor is programmed into it by a human).

If you put tires on that are 27.5" in effective tread diameter vs. the stock 26", it's "rotations per mile" data will be in error - it must look at *relative* speed data.

Again, unless it is via some GPS info., that is an impossibility.

No - they compare one wheel rotational speed to the others, like Steve was saying.

Correct. But the car knows nothing about rotations per mile other than from the pinion factor programed into it (IOW, change the effective tire OD to something different, and it doesn't know that). It can do relative measurements (one wheel relative to another), but it does not know absolute measurements.

What do these sensors on the 300C look at? Is it at all related to GPS?

If I'm wrong about anything I've said above, I will apologize. :)

Reply to
Bill Putney

That's what I was saying in a post from this a.m. when I said "I always thought they compared rotational rate of the wheels - kind of determining an average speed of the wheels and looking for variations of an individual wheel outside of a moderately wide tolerance band (to allow for normal variations during turning, etc)."

Reply to
Bill Putney

You can look at the RPM / RPS history (rotations per minute or per second) of any wheel independently or individually to know if that wheel is slowing down at a rate that would point to imminent lock-up.

The road conditions, traction, etc, can be too variable between wheels for their information to be used as part of an algorythm to feed back into the modulation pattern of individual wheels.

Remember that the RPM history of each wheel is knowable to the computer during the few seconds prior to brake application. During those few seconds, the computer knows the RPM of each wheel, and an internal algorythm can theoretically know the allowable rate-of-change of RPM at that specific RPM before it starts to modulate the brake pressure at that wheel. It doesn't need to know what the other wheels are doing during braking, and it's hard imagine just how you would use any differential information in a reliable and effective way.

Once the RPM has reached some arbitrary low value, the abs must deactivate itself - otherwise theoretically it would never allow you to stop the car because it would never allow the wheels to stop rolling.

You are making a prediction that if my front tires were, say, 1" in diameter larger than the rear tires, that my ABS system would either (a) activate itself unnecessarily during non-skid braking, or (b) would fail to activate and would allow some or all tires to skid. I don't buy that argument.

Reply to
MoPar Man

I believe that's more or less exactly what the FSM for my (now sold) 93 Vision TSi said. Granted, that's older-tech ABS.

The reason I cannot believe that the computer looks *only* at sudden changes in each wheel's rotation is that you could have a pathological case where a wheel starts slipping and gradually drops its speed to zero while all the other wheels continue turning. That situation never happens with ABS, so it DOES look at the other wheels to know that they're still turning, even if that's not used for the initial trip-in of ABS.

Reply to
Steve

Auto stick and TC are two features I like very much. If you left TC on you'd get there with regular all season tires.

Sliding friction is much less static friction. My objective on slippery roads is not to wheel spin, TC helps you to achieve that, but is is very noisy. You must have skipped your high school physics class.

True, but I've not found the 300M's tires to be that excessively wide, that the wheels float up on snow. If speed is excessive that could be a problem, but snow calls for much lower driving speeds anyway to be safe.

Reply to
Josh S

Interesting -- we got autostick on our Intrepid because we couldn't get a manual transmission (we have gotten a manual transmission on every vehicle we have owned on which we have had a choice. We even gave up the 4.7L V8 on our Dakota in favor of the 3.7V6, so we could get a real transmission). We've found we've almost never used the autostick in practice -- the only use it's ever gotten has been when we've had cruise control on in hilly country and the "hunting" has gotten obnoxious.

It's in freshman college physics you find out that "dynamic" friction and "static" friction are incredibly crude models, and neither models tire grip even vaguely reasonably. Especially when you're looking at tire grip in the presence of a dry lubricant.

Reply to
Joe Pfeiffer

You must live in flatter country. Here in western Canada there are lots of long hills, even in the city I live in. On a 15 minute drive to my tennis club I downshift twice going and once returning. Perhaps since about 50% of my driving life was done with a stick shift, I'm more into downshifting on hills, rather than standing on the brake for a few minutes.

They are crude for sure, but tell a basic story. Then there is the reduced traction from water then ice that forms under a slipping tire. The bottom line is don't slide on snow or ice if possible, either when braking or accelerating. The engineers who designed TC and ABS are well aware of this.

Reply to
Josh S

MotorsForum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.