<sigh>This is really a continuation of
this thread (for me). The tires are for my friend. The dealer, which you may remember, Accumulator, is EuroTire here in NJ, which was one of the early big mailorder tire places from the late 70's, back when the European cars were coming with P-metric tires, and the American cars still came with letter-size (hard to find tires at that time for your M-B, for example). There were also a lot of gray-market exotics and more run of the mill exotics (Porsches, etc.) that had low profile tires and alloy wheels at a time when your standard tire store wasn't equipped to service them. So in the early 80's, EuroTire opened a service center, catering to those customers. It really was a cool place and you could see Ferraris, etc. getting tires. Eventually, their mail order (then internet) business was run over (ha ha) by Tire Rack, but they still have the service center (although their clientele is not so exotic as 20 years ago).
They used to sell the Blizzaks, so I asked him for a quote to swap Blizzaks onto my friend's factory steelies, and he wouldn't even quote me on them, insisting the Vredestein's were the way to go.
As far as the Dunlops; even Tire Rack says they are not as good on snow and ice as the Blizzaks. My friend is mostly concerned about sliding on snow and ice, so the Blizzak would be indicated, but even though she doesn't drive like Maxy (White95Max), she is a bit of a leadfoot, so I'm a little concerned about the mushy handling and quick wear of the dual-compound tires, since we typically have a lot of dry periods here in NJ during the winter. Maxy likes to point out the Tire Rack survey which rates that Dunlop Winter Sport M3 as the best winter tire; I'm skeptical of a survey which couples not only non-trained drivers, but makes no differentiation between expectations and results. If you notice, the new Goodyear Assurance TripleTred (passenger all-season) rates very highly compared to the Dunlop (high performance winter)...is that because the Goodyear buyers had different expectations than the Dunlop buyers? If you expect the tire to be crap and it isn't, do you rate it a 10 because you are so pleasantly surprised? Or because you don't know any better? I just don't (completely) trust the scientific basis of their surveys.