Bottom line, up front: Sticks like glue, descent dry/wet/snow performance, loudest tire noise that I've ever heard on a passenger car. Avoid!



These tires were on my car when I bought it used, about 10k miles ago. I'm going to guess that they had about 10k miles on them when I bought the car, and it appears that they'll be good for another 20k miles.

Which is too bad.

These are the noisiest tires that I've ever heard on a passenger car, and they compare to off-roading truck tires. I can hardly wait to replace them.

When I first started noticing the tire noise, I couldn't definitively locate the noise. I'm driving an X-Type, which has all wheel drive and the accompanying mechanical bits - a transfer case and a drive-shaft with a center-support bearing. For you non X-Type owners, both the transfer case and the center bearing have some wear and maintenance issues, and I initially wondered if I might have a problem with one component or the other. On the other hand, most of those problems are with pre-2004 cars, and mine is a 2004.

The X-Type also has some known issue with front wheel bearings. I've checked them - all four corners, actually, and I'm positive that the bearings are fine. No binding, no noises, nice and tight.

But then I had some passengers in the car - car guys, like me, who have a clue about such noises. One sitting in the back seat thought the noise might be coming from the right rear; one in the front passenger seat thought the noise was from the front right. I've always thought the primary noise was "somewhere to my right, and below the floorboard." Hmmm....

The breakthrough came during the first oil change, when I also rotated the tires. The most prominent noise shifted from the right rear to the right front. And with that realization, I also realized that I've been hearing the same noise - just less of it - from the other three corners of the car.

An internet search of reviews of this tire was a mixed bag: most owners praised the tires performance, but reviews were evenly split among "very quiet" and "noisiest tires I've ever had." It took a very thorough reading of several dozen reviews to recognize a pattern: once these tires hit about 15k miles, they started getting noisy. I have no explanation for this change in tire noise.

Since this is a tire that any Jag owner in need of an all-season tire might consider, I figured I'd throw my two cents in. No one else had yet mentioned this product in the tire forums, so hopefully this saves someone from a few years of noisy aggravation.

 

I second the comment on the Proxes T1R's. I have 30K and they are very noisy and as you said they just keep getting worse. The performance wasn't bad, but they are strictly a summer tire, as the wet traction is very poor.

My next tire is going to be the Conti ExtremeContact DWS.

 

I disagree on the poor wet traction, the Toyos in general have very good wet traction. The T1S's I originally tried have had the best wet traction of any tire I've ever driven. I've gone through several sets due to the track abuse I put them through. The T1R's aren't quite as good, however, but still superior to just about everything I've driven. I will point out though that it appears wet traction may be slightly dependent upon tire temps. The silica compound can really handle a lot of temperature and after they warm up they stick to the wet roads a lot better. I have T1R's on my X now and I love them.
I recently did a two day track event at NHMS and as I was in the advanced group with a stock car I was the slowest on the track (excepting one particularly slow A6 2.7T ) the first day. There was a hard rain over night and the track was very slick. Every other car was on race tires (again, advanced run group) and I did not slow down at all. I was passing cars with alacrity.

 

Back to the Toyo Proxes 4 that I started this thread about....

Last summer, I had one of these tires develop a sidewall bubble, so I replaced it with a used tire of the same brand/model/size. Last week, another one failed in the same manner. No longer trusting this particular brand and model of tire, and with the aforementioned road noise problems, I decided to replace all four tires, even though there was easily 20-30k miles of tread left on them.

So I switched to Bridgestone Potenza RE970AS. That's Bridgestone's top of the line all-season, and it's a successor to the RE960 tires that I had on my last Volvo. Those tires were quiet and grippy, and the 970 has a similar tread pattern to the 960, so I expected similar performance.

The new tires don't feel quite as responsive on-center, but then again, they have full tread depth whereas the old tires should have had felt a little more direct due to the lack of flex in a considerably shorter (worn) tread block. But I didn't immediately notice less tire noise when I drove the car home from the tire shop.

But driving to work this morning, at highway speeds, I realized something when I finally turned the radio down: the predominant sound in the car was no longer tire noise, but was wind and engine noise. In fact, I'm really not hearing tire noise at all until I get to coarse surfaces like concrete. Yay! No more off-roader-style tire noise in my Jag!

This just reinforces what I said in the first place:

Toyo Proxes 4 tires are excessively noisy. Avoid them for your Jaguar.