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I recently flew to Colorado to test two new tires from Bridgestone, the Blizzak 6 and the Dueler A/T Ascent. The first is aimed at keeping sports sedans and sports cars in use year-round, while the second wants to encourage owners of luxury trucks and SUVs to get off the pavement more often.
The rustic ski town of Steamboat Springs sits 150 miles Northwest of Denver at 7,000 feet above sea level. It’s snow-blanketed A-frame buildings and locals draped in Ecuadorian alpaca wool jackets transport you to the setting of every Hallmark Channel Christmas movie. It’s home to the funkiest bridge in the world and gets its name from founder, Larry Steamboat. I’m almost certain that’s what my shuttle driver said. I was at the Las Vegas airport before the coffee bar opened. If I’m there before the baristas at Espresso Urbano, you can write off any clarity for the rest of the day. Besides, we live in a post-fact-check world, right? Don’t worry, I had almost 12 hours to adapt to the altitude and catch up on missed caffeine. I was in tip-top shape to test some tires.
Snow Tire, Winter Tire, All-Season Tire, What Does It All Mean?
Starting with the easiest, snow tires and winter tires are the same thing. The more accurate name is winter tires as they don’t just excel in the snow, but in freezing temperatures as well. All-season tires are sometimes referred to as three-season tires. They’re designed for Spring, Summer, and Fall. The compounds are usually optimized for temperatures above 45° F. While they offer more grip in snow and ice than a summer tire, they aren’t your best choice. If you want a real year-round tire, you need an all-weather tire with a Three Peak Mountain Snowflake 3PMSF certification.
Both the Blizzak 6 and the A/T Ascent are 3 Peak Mountain Snowflake, 3PMSF-rated. The A/T Asscent is a tire you can use all year on your truck or SUV. While you could technically run the Blizzak 6 all year on your car or sedan, you probably don’t want to. This leads to what makes a tire grip on different surfaces—starting with snow. The rubber compound of a tire doesn’t offer much grip on snow. Your traction comes from all the small biting edges, called sipes, you see in the tread of a snow tire. Counterintuitively, you also want the voids in the tread to pack with snow as the snow-on-snow offers a greater coefficient of friction than rubber on snow.
There’s also a misconception that off-road and all-terrain tires, with their knobby tread blocks and big voids, are good in snow. But as I said above it’s the edges that grip. Those big chunky lugged blocks don’t have enough of them. Plus, an off-road tire ejects material rather than loads up with it. So, you don’t get the benefit of packing voids with snow.
On the road, you want as much compound on the asphalt as possible. This is why racecars use slick tires. The only reason for tread on road tires is to evacuate water. If we could guarantee there was zero chance of ever hydroplaning, we’d all be commuting on slicks.
How Does The Blizzak 6 Compare To The Competition?
Besides a local restaurant with spectacular truffle fries, Bridgestone chose Steamboat because it’s the location of its winter driving school. The instruction comes in multiple stages, from half-day basics of braking for beginners to multiday Hogwats of Hooning for rally racing wannabes. Bridgestone wanted to make sure everyone had at least a base level of competence. So the morning was spent on basic snow and ice skills learning the layout of the different tracks. We familiarized ourselves with older Bridgestone tire models on Toyota Highlanders and Camrys (Camrii).
Throughout my two decades in automotive journalism, I average two or three tire tests a year. Normally, tire companies choose cars that people who drive cars for a living want to drive; GTIs, Caymans, Camaros, AMGs, I’ve even done tire testing with all supercars. Tire makers want you to be excited just looking at the cars. While the Highlander is quite good, Bridgestone’s choice of the Camry is uh, surprising. If there’s any car for sale today that makes an enthusiast’s heart pine for the thrill and excitement of a bus pass more than a CVT-equipped Camry Hybrid, I haven’t experienced it. Don’t worry, it gets better.
The new Blizzak 6 uses Bridgestone’s latest tech and is the first winter tire in the company’s ENLITEN Strategy. Like seemingly all tire companies, Bridgestone wants to make tires from more recycled and renewable materials while lessening its carbon impact and synergizing with polar bears’ core competencies. I know, eco-friendly, some of you already hate it because who doesn’t want more pollution am I right? Let me lay out the good news. To make tires more environmentally friendly, the chemists have formulated tires that offer lower rolling resistance—yay spend less on gas—and making a tire that will last 32% longer than its predecessor—Oddly specific but yay buy tires less often. All while making a—spoiler alert—better tire.
From the old Blizzak WS90 on Camrii to the Blizzak 6 on GR Freakin’ Corrolas. Now that’s how you shock the senses. I’m not going to say this was a good A/B test to compare the old tire to the new one. But, I can tell you the Blizzak 6 feels pretty good on packed snow. The most important thing is that it communicates the amount of grip available.
The GR Corrola is great at sorting out oversteer. Powering out of turns was as easy as pointing the nose in the direction you want to go and getting generous with the gas. But, bringing the car back from understeer is where the new Blizzak shines. Once the old tire let go, there’s very little feel. It requires using a lot more butt-gyro to feel for yaw while unwinding. With the 6, you can feel it coming back and can drive out in front of the car instead of just being reactionary.
The Blizzak 6 uses a chevron tread pattern. That makes it perform better pumping water when the temperature is above freezing. From a distance, it looks more like a 90s-era summer tire. But get closer and you can see all the sipes that make it bite in the snow. The sipes have an intricate repeating pattern that not only increases the number of edges but also allows them to lock together under load on dry pavement, which makes the tire feel more like an all-season or summer tire by decreasing tread squirm. I didn’t experience this myself, but that’s the theory.
How does the Blizzak 6 compare to its competition? I don’t know. The testing on this trip convinced me it’s a very competent tire. It certainly feels appropriate to something like a GR Corolla or anything else in the intended applications of sports cars and sedans. The Blizzak 6 will hit North America in May 2025. It will come in over 38 sizes for 17 to 22 inches wheels.
Is The Dueler A/T Ascent A Snow Or Off Road Tire? Yes.
Unlike the Blizzak 6, test driving the Dueler A/T Ascent involved an A/B test with the tire Bridgestone considers its number one competitor, the Pirelli Scorpion A/T Plus. The Italian tire has become the standard for expensive pickups and luxury SUVs equipped with all-terrain tires. The Dueler A/T Ascent is available now in 17 through 22-inch sizes. All but one size has an outside diameter less than 30 inches(most considerably larger), with the narrowest width being a 245. These are big tires, you’re gonna need a lift kit to get them on your overlanding Crosstrek.
Bridgestone had Toyota 4-Runners with either the Dueler or the Scorpion and I was able to drive them back-to-back on the same track. The Bridgestone seems to have a slight edge in stopping distance and lateral grip, but the big differences are limit behavior and feel. The Pirelli transmits every tread block biting at the snow and then chattering as it loses purchase. That release is abrupt and takes deliberate action and patience to get the tires working again. Laps of the track were a string of breaks in forward progress to recompose the car. Forgive the strained analogy, but it feels like carving a turn on a snowboard on hardpack when your edge starts to chatter and your options are to kick it more sideways and lose a bunch of speed, or flatten out and go whatever direction your momentum is taking you.
The Dueler A/T Ascent on the other hand gets rid of that chatter. It made the same snow on the same track feel like I was sinking my snowboard into packed powder and not using the edge to bite, getting plenty of nice smooth push off the entire bottom of the board. The Dueler has more ultimate grip and it falls off slower too. I found myself able to rotate the 4-Runner around and drive it more on the throttle. It works into the snow instead of biting at the top of it. It’s more enjoyable to drive, but what matters more is the confidence it inspires to make corrections instead of waiting for the tires to grind off some speed and find their footing again.
The Dueler A/T Ascent is a 3 Peak Mountain Snowflake tire and Bridgestone says they expect most customers to use them year-round. It also uses ENLITEN technology, so owners of 5,600 lb twin-turbo V8-powered g550s can feel better about themselves. Again, I only drove the tire on snow, but Bridgestone assures us that the tire is designed to be quiet and comfortable on the road, while still delivering the off-road performance suggested by the big lugged treads overflowing onto the sidewalls. A quick look at the ratings on Tire Rack shows it as Excellent across all categories. I buy that. The Dueler A/T Ascent is available now in 35 sizes, in P-metric and LT designations. The coffee situation during the trip never improved.
