We drove a bunch of cars equipped with the P Zero AS Plus 3 to find out if it's the new gold standard.
Pirelli uses the term “high value” to describe its tires, meaning the 151-year-old tire company isn't interested in making and selling cheap tires in volume for the average family vehicle.
Its latest tire, the Pirelli P Zero AS Plus 3, has been launched and is aimed explicitly at performance and sporty premium vehicles. Think of it as an all-season variant of Pirelli's P Zero PZ4 high-performance tire designed specifically for the US market, and you're in the right ballpark.
The new tire joins the recently released Scorpion AS Plus 3 for crossovers, SUVs, and pickup trucks and the P7 AS Plus 3 touring tire for sedans and coupes. But the Pirelli P Zero AS Plus 3 enters the lineup as “the top performing all-season tire in the Pirelli range.” To get an insight into the new tire and the rest of the AS Plus 3 range, Pirelli invited us to visit Las Vegas to spend some time on the road and track with the tires.
The Pirelli P Zero AS Plus 3 doesn't resemble the pure performance P Zero PZ4 tire in tread or construction as it's designed to combine comfort, durability, all-season ability, and handling into a single tire. In short, the P Zero PZ4 is what our industry often refers to as a summer tire that performs outrageously well at ideal temperatures, while the P Zero AS Plus 3 won't deliver quite the same grip in summer conditions, but it will deliver consistent excellent grip throughout the year.
Tire technology and regulation is an incredibly dense subject, and we don't pretend to understand the science behind the polymers. Still, in the tire industry, the recipe for tire rubbers is guarded in a way that would make Coca-Cola executives raise an eyebrow. One of the technologies we could wrap our heads around is something Pirelli describes as 3D sipe technology.
Essentially, siping describes the thin slits across the surface of a tire designed to improve traction when driving in snowy, wet, or icy conditions. Pirelli claims its approach improves rigidity in the tread to help overall performance in wet weather, improves traction and braking in snow, and decreases tire wear.
To show off the tires, Pirelli first sent us out with an instructor from Las Vegas's excellent Dream Racing team on the longer and less technical Las Vegas Speedway track in an Alfa Romeo Stelvio on Scorpion AS Plus 3 tires. We've driven the track before in a crossover, so we were able to concentrate on pushing the tires around on their limits.
Predictability is a word we'll use a lot because that's the impression we got through the range – particularly once the limits of grip are reached.
Pirelli kindly kept a corner and the transition area into the next one wet to show that the behavior of the tire doesn't change in the wet, and the loss of grip is minimal.
When we deliberately pushed too hard in the Stelvio and the faster and twitchier Toyota Supra riding on the P7 AS Plus 3 tires, it was surprisingly undramatic to recover – and we're merely competent track-day drivers. After a few more laps in the Supra, we were confident enough to play and push the car harder as in the section going from dry to wet concrete.
We left the cars to go and drive something much more exotic on the more demanding track with the words “predictable” and “consistent” in our heads. Those are excellent traits in any tire, particularly those designed to be pushed to the limit.
Dream Racing has an impressive stable of cars in its garage to teach people to drive fast, including Lamborghinis, a Ferrari, an Aston Martin DB7, and so on. However, when given the opportunity, we chose a Porsche Cayman GT4 to run the P Zero AS Plus 3s. The thinking was that while the other cars are more powerful and appeal to our sense of fun, the Cayman GT4 is a perfect combination of track/road-legal car.
Again, predictability and consistency are the overall takeaways from a bunch of laps and how well they cope with the GT4's stopping power at the end of a straight. We also chose the Cayman GT4 because it's a car that can flatter people without a lot of track experience, and the tires did nothing to put a dent in that. They communicate when they reach the end of their ability to grip, and then it drops away progressively, meaning there's time to collect the back as it hangs out even if you're wholly ham-footed on the throttle exiting a corner.
Which we were.
Neither car nor tire is magical, and the Cayman GT4 can be spun out, but the point here is the two together give plenty of warning and are consistent once that grip starts to go away.
Finally, to wind down, we took out some larger crossovers (in our case, a Buick) for a ride into the spectacular scenery of Fire Valley in Nevada. The drive involved a beaten-up freeway, an even more beaten-up piece of road leading down to the state park, and some twisty tarmac. The tires were confidence inspiring enough, so we played it up for the video and photo guys hanging out the back of a Ford Explorer. The point is you have to be incredibly sure of what you're driving to be precise when running vehicles so close together on an unfamiliar road, and by then, we trusted those tires.
At launch, the tire is available in 31 sizes from 17 to 22 inches and comes with a 50,000-mile limited treadwear warranty.
Keyword: Driven: Pirelli's New All-Season Tire Provides High Performance All Year Long