Michelin LT/AT2 Close-up

By Thom Cannell
Detroit Bureau
The Auto Channel

Michelin LTX A/T2 could be the right tire for your SUV, work or family pickup. They’re designed for off road capability, comfort, and offer a money-saving 60,000-mile durability guarantee.

Designed with a four-rib tread, the A/T2 has aggressive notched tread blocks providing plenty of biting edges for when you go need to drive on dirt. Michelin says the overall design was optimized for comfort and, when compared to competitors, a tire that combines every important attribute of a truck/SUV tire. It’s like getting the best of A, and B, and C, and D instead of only grip, or smoothness, or longevity, or quietness.

Let’s call A the tread design. Center ribs have a distinctive “E” shape that make lots of edges for cutting into dirt, gripping rocks and snow, and slicing up standing water for wet traction. Sipes, thin cuts into tread blocks, use both straight cuts and zigzag cuts to improve grip. Straight cut sipes will, under pressure, deform similar to the way a deck of cards will show every edge when bent. They create grip and water cutting edges in the line of travel and help transport liquid away from under the blocks. Zigzag cuts act similarly, but present an increase in gripping edges in lateral directions, like cornering and side hilling. Michelin says its tread life is class leading.

B would be tire roundness, both at the bead seal and all the way around the entire circumference. Michelin says a round tire is a quiet and vibration-free tire. Like racing tires, the LTX A/T2 is said to be so well balanced internally that wheel weights are mostly for imbalances in the rim.

For C, there is “MaxTouch Construction” otherwise known as getting the rubber onto the road. Michelin says their tire contact patch is larger and more rectangular without loosing fuel economy through increased rolling resistance.

D and E are Michelin’s Comfort Control Technology; their way of saying the tire is designed to ride comfortably and quietly. Lots of computer time is spent generating tread design that is quiet.

In every tire, each block in a tread acts like a tuning fork and when it hits the road it generates noise. Make the tread blocks similar and you have a heavy metal band jamming under your truck. Work the formulas (math is cool) and you can get tread blocks to emit dissimilar noises that actually cancel each other—at least they don’t build up and screech.

Compared to its previous LTX tires, Michelin will offer 15 P-metric sizes, and 16 C, D, and E-rated tires for a total of 32 sizes in 16”, 17”, 18”, and 20” diameters. Also, D and E-rated tires use a thicker inner liner and a third belt to handle increased loads and pressures.

Putting the rubber to the road, rocks, hills, and street, we put a few miles on these new tires. Off road, mechanical traction is hugely important and the reason you seldom see off road slicks! The new LTX A/T2 is designed to create its maximum traction at standard tire pressures—usually 35 p.s.i.—as most owners don’t have on-board tire inflation equipment for the typical “air-down off road” and requisite re-inflation.

We drove Ford F150s equipped with the new tire on a short “torture test” of rocks, steep hills and side hills, and twist ditches. As expected the tires performed flawlessly. We didn’t get the needed highway miles to evaluate quietness claims.

When rock crawling, the LTX A/T2 did conform to the surface, wrapping tightly to any available edge to grip tightly. Crawling up 40° hills was no problem and coming down the other side equally simple (it helped that the dirt packed tightly.) Over twist ditches, logs, rocks and gravel, traction was good. And in both steep side hilling and long hill descents there was no problem with loss of traction. For what is essentially a street tire with good off road capabilities, it did a great job and is a tire we can recommend.