The Reason New Tires Have Colored Stripes On The Tread

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links. High ground clearance, four-wheel-drive systems with locking differentials, long-travel suspension, and LED lights that could cause sunburn are all cool and totally necessary in off-road vehicles. Still, the single most important upgrade you can make to your SUV or truck for traversing challenging terrain is replacing the original road tires with a set of all-terrain or off-road tires. These have deeper grooves and larger tread blocks for higher traction on all sorts of surfaces, including gravel, dirt, and mud, and they can transform your truck/SUV into an off-road beast. Naturally, off-road — more frequently known as all- or mud-terrain — tires are more aggressive and tend to sacrifice on-road comfort and grip to give you the ultimate off-road traction.

Despite a humdrum hybrid powertrain, the 2026 Honda Prelude handles like a dream, and it offers two types of tires. A set of Goodyear Eagle Touring all-season tires is standard, but Continental ExtremeContact Sport 02 summer tires are a $1200 dealer-installed option. We’ve now tested one Prelude on all-season tires and another with summer rubber, and the results show the latter set helped it corner harder and stop shorter. Welcome to Car and Driver’s Testing Hub, where we zoom in on the test numbers. We’ve been pushing vehicles to their limits since 1956 to provide objective data to bolster our subjective impressions (you can see how we test here). Like most enthusiasts, we were a bit disappointed by the 2026 Honda Prelude’s firepower—or lack thereof. Now that we’ve tested a Prelude on its standard all-season tires, rather than just the set of sticky summer rubber on the first car we tested, we have the full picture of the little coupe’s performance. Unfortunately, switching from the all-season tires to dedicated summer performance tires doesn’t do as much as we initially hoped—but, fortunately, the grippier rubber does improve the sporty coupe where it counts.

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