matttproud

Beyond the questions of winter weather properties, there are adjacent tradeoffs between the tire types (outside of studded):

1. Fuel economy

2. Noise

3. Degree of particulate pollution emission

I'm sure that the all-season tires probably have some negative tradeoffs in these regards to, which yields a choose the most optimal product for the time of year. All-season tires to me seem like a convenience food for places where the weather can be legitimately bad.

One other difference that is hard to articulate to North American drivers with respect to understanding Scandinavia and roads: there are places where snow and ice will literally not be removed (maybe not even removeable) from the road when plowed (I presume until spring melt). It just becomes a thick ice pack over the course of weeks. I never encountered any roads in my life (including Northern Minnesota) that were this inclement. North American roads tend to be cleared (plowing or melting) to asphalt or pavement.

The reality of car dependency there means that there are people driving and owning cars who can't really afford to do it properly, nor do they know they need to do it properly (e.g., having a second set of tires for the winter). You can see this evidenced by the rust buckets on the road that look like they are one pothole away from losing part of the vehicle body. Deferred maintenance and investment everywhere and in everything …

I lived in the Oklahoma and in Minnesota, and the difference there is already stark:

* OK suffered from plenty of storm-induced winter power outages (massive freezing rain cycles were common in my life). My mother's cotton bath robe, which she kept using until late in her life, had burn marks from when she reached for something over a lit candle during a power outage when I was four years old.

* MN suffers some, but people knew to develop meaningful contingency plans.

Both states have variegated buried-power-to-the-premises usage. It's not really to be expected as the norm in either place, but MN has far more than OK (funnily enough I grew up in a place in OK with it). Either way, the infrastructure robustness in North America looks like it arose from a dismal cost-benefit analysis versus a societal welfare consideration.

I left North America about 14 years ago for Europe. The difference is stark. We've only had one significant power interruption in that time (not even in winter); whereas stochastic neighborhood outages were commonplace in North America. What really freaks me out about the situation in North America is just the poor insulation of the structures and their low thermal mass. They will get cold fast.

Aside: A lot of friends and family in North America balked at the idea of getting a heat pump due to performance during a power outage: "when the power goes out, I can still run my gas." When I asked them whether the house was heated with forced air or used an electronic thermostatic switches, the snarky smile turned to a grimace.

When you live in a cold place, you learn to do things differently. You're naive if you don't pack warm blankets and water in your vehicle, for instance. You never know when you might find yourself stranded somewhere due to vehicular breakdown …