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From YourSITE.com Reviews & Road Tests We’ve mentioned it before, but our 4 Season S4 is a pleasure to own and drive. Other than its performance car gas mileage (about 20 mpg) and our self-inflicted tire rubbing, we’ve had very few complaints about the car.
9508 miles The service light goes off. Without checking our service book to verify service intervals, we call and schedule an appointment at our local dealership Autohaus Lancaster in Pennsylvania. Due to our late-notice needs and scheduling constraints, this is the first time our S4 has been scheduled at our PA-based dealer, so we first go through the usual input of information for a new car by an existing customer. Following that, our service manager is appreciably honest about our situation. He points out that the next service isn’t due until 15,000 miles. While he could have taken the car in and simply charged us for it, he points our error out. For some reason the service light had been triggered – perhaps incorrectly cleared out at the last servicing. He resets the light for us free-of-charge and sends us on our way, expected to return in about 5,000 miles.
9545 miles Keener Tire Service in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania is a well-kept secret of ours. Working out of a garage on a rural farm in Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County, Keener is fairly described as “off the beaten path.” We’d first gone to Keener for an install of tires for some 20-inch alloys on a Volvo XC90 project series that is currently running on our sister website Swedespeed.com when our Volvo dealer pointed out that they couldn’t mount 20s. We were so impressed with the result, extreme care for not scratching the wheel and a very reasonable price, that we returned when it was time to fit our new tires on the S4. Given we’re replacing the tires, we figured we’d change to a different brand and design for comparison’s sake. Nitto and their aggressive-looking new INVO seemed like a worthy candidate. The INVO has been grabbing attention in the performance market lately, a high-performance street tire engineered for minimized road noise and improved wet and dry weather performance. The tire is non-directional, a more recent trend away from the once more popular variety of directional tread offerings on the market. We’re told by sources in the tire industry that directionals tend to get noisier as they wear, and that’s one reason for the changing market. Additionally, non-directionals allow more flexibility for tire rotation. Running staggered widths for instance, you can still rotate your tires from right to left. While we don’t run staggered fitment on our S4’s 19-inch OZ Superturismos, the added flexibility and expected quietness is a plus.
Visually, the tread pattern on the INVO is quite unique. One of the most attention-grabbing elements is a single continuous inner shoulder. Nitto submits that this offers two main benefits. First, it offers increased rigidity to the INVO. Second, it also increases connection with the road under hard braking or acceleration. Grooves on either side of the continuous band, combined with the surrounding triangular tread pattern, are there to channel water way in wet conditions. The triangular-dominated outer shoulder is designed to increase the increase the contact patch with the road to the outside wheels under hard cornering – increasing performance hot into curves. For a 19-inch Z-rated performance tire, Nittos seem fairly priced. No, they’re not terribly cheap, but $191 (current price from Discount Tire Direct as of this writing) seems reasonable. 9691 miles We’re experiencing no rubbing at all and happy to be able to be able to use the full abilities of our S4 and the H&R suspension we’d installed. Even under hard corners on the street, we’ve experience not even the slightest whisper of a rub. Though the OZ Superturismos may be wider than our stock S4 wheels, the 235 series Nittos are closer to our original setup and seem to have fixed the problem. Our alloys have less rubber to protect them from either being curbed while parking or bent on potholes, but the rubbing is now gone and we’ve not experienced any damage issues as of yet due to the different-size rubber. – George Achorn, Managing Editor
9909 miles We had the 235/35/19 Nitto INVO tires mounted in hopes to alleviate the rear tire rubbing problems caused by the wider, 245/35/19 Avon Tech M500 tires. The 10mm difference in width between the tires made all of the difference and our S4 is now completely rub-free. The INVOs have a unique tread pattern, which looks interesting, but the tires are noisier than we expected on certain surfaces given their billing as being computer-designed to minimize noise. Aside from some road noise, sidewall stiffness, cornering, dry, and wet traction are all excellent and we couldn’t be happier with the results. – Anthony Garbis, Managing Editor 10,350 miles I pick up our 4 Season S4 from Mr. Garbis while on a photo shoot in Virginia for our sister publication MotiveMagazine.com. As he pulls into the parking lot of the fast food chain where we’d planned on meeting, I spot another missing center cap on the opposite side of the car. Upon return home, I place another order from Tire Rack for a replacement cap. The drill is the same as last month, $25 paid and the cap arrives speedily within 48 hours. Tire Rack is always a pleasure to deal with. Their customer service, follow up emails with tracking numbers and packaging is always most impressive. – George Achorn, Manging Editor
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