Hey all!

Thinking more and more about taking my Q7 on a trip touring the United States! I've lived in the Northeast (New Hampshire) my whole life, never been off the east coast, and now I think it's time to see the rest of my own country.

I'd like to be able to explore, not just stay on paved roads. Problem is, I don't think my OEM wheels and low profile tires will be very capable, even with light off-roading. I have a good idea for what tires I'd like to end up getting, but first, I need to know what wheel size works best for y'all, and therefore, which tire size works best WITH the wheel size chosen.

Knowing I'll be traveling, I don't want to run into issues with speedometer inaccuracy or gas mileage if I can avoid them. I'd like to stick with the overall same size of wheel and tire combined-- just more tire, less wheel.

Show me what you have, and let me know the sizes!

 

I sold my 20 inch tires after driving on 18 inch tires. I have zero regrets. As for speedometer errors. At 90 mph my speed is out by 3 mph. You can input tires and compare here https://tiresize.com/comparison/
see video

 

I really like my 265/60R18s. While technically a little larger than stock, they actually make my speedometer spot on versus the stock size (275/45R20), which would read about 3 mph low at 70 mph. IIRC, the closest to spot-on-same size to the stock size is 255/60R18, if you can get that (tire selection is much more restricted at that size, so I guess it must not be particularly popular). 255/55R18, which is a size sites like TireRack recommend as an alternate, is slightly smaller.

 

I can relate! Just swapped my high performance street Pirelli's for a set of Cooper Discoverer Road & Trail AT tires. I went with an optional sizing of 265/50/20 XL, and the really great thing is these AT tires are still V speed rated, which gives you really good handling stability and steering feel, while managing to deliver a really nice ride overall (steel suspension). I did play around with air pressure before settling into 42 psi as my baseline on these all around.

The speedo is spot-on with this optional sizing, whereas with the OE street tires mounted it was off by 1mph, so bonus!

Just had 20" of fresh snow in a day...still have a good bit on ground but melting and icing over now, and these tires have been absolutely incredible and consistent throughout. In particular I bought them living in a rural area with lots of gravel & dirt farm roads and I like to adventure around myself offroad. These are a true four season tire and would be great for touring across the country...they ride really well and very low noise from them.

FWIW: Tire Rack tested this against myriad other AT tires for road biased/off-road biased, and serious off-road tires, and rates (and their customer reviews back this up) this tire as the #1 pick in this class of tire (highway/Trail AT tires), and they are an excellent value, and still made in the USA (Cooper Tires is one of the oldest tire companies, and is now owned by Goodyear).

Literally just ordered another set of these for my son's Ford F-150 4x4 pickup truck, which never made it out of his driveway once during the past week of snow...well, maybe just enough to get fully dug-in stuck so then I had to tow-strap ****** it and drag it back to safety with the Q7 TDI riding on these Cooper Discoverer tires. This is the latest iteration of this Cooper tire wherein they also changed up the naming slightly, and the older versions are now discontinued. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, and I don't usually gush about tires.

 

I just installed 275/45/20 Falken Wildpeaks. They are an on-road all-terrain tire and since my Q7 spends all its time on the road I figured these would be quieter than the two other off-road option in the 275/45-20 size. Plus I'm a fan of Falkens on my corrado, I've bought 5 sets of the Falken Azenis RT615K+ for my different sets of LMs. Great tire

I had a set of 295/40/20 Toyo Proxies on my 20"x10" Audi Speedline/BBS wheels ET44 and they have held up really well and though I pulled them off at 38k miles I'm certain I could have gotten another 10k miles out before I hit the wearbars.

I used Eurowise's fitment guide to help figure out what would work without issue.



The key challenge I have is my factory Audi wheels are 10" wide. So I put together a tire calculator to compare a bunch of different combos.



The 275 fit nicely on the 10" wide wheels



This really does a great job on the wheels.




Paint cleaned up and tire dressing.



I'll be adding 15mm spacers all the way around to help with the stance after the road salt season ends.

 

That said I have a set of VERY old Cayenne studded snow tires with full tread depth and they are like velcro in snow conditions. When the audi geeks start talking about geckos and quattro they must be talking about studded snow tires WOW!!!! go anywhere anytime. I get excited when I get to put them on.

 

Here's a link to the recent AT tires testing by Tire Rack, which I used to help decide based on my own personal handling/braking/steering feel, off-road and snow-traction 'wants' in an AT tire:

Ok, link didn't work, and it just redirects to their main landing page, so if you wanna view their AT tires testing (2024 tires), then you'll have to go to tirerack.com site and punch in vehicle/tires sizing data, etc. I used alternate tire sizing to bring up the Cooper Discoverer / and the Falken Wildpeak in 265/50R20 XL. I just used this site for research, but Discount Tire bought them or vice versa, and so it's a wash pretty much, but I ordered tires from Discount tire (5% off military discount and price matching).

Good hunting!

 

Well, I think I've narrowed it down to two options, and I'd like to know if anyone has experience with either of these, and what the experience is like.

General Grabber AT3 (275/45R20)

and

Nitto Nomad Grappler (275/45R20)

 

For your use case, I think the Nitto is the better choice. You're looking at a lot of highway driving with some limited gravel/dirt/random surface mixed in. Alternatively, several folks here have gone with the Falken offering (and been happy with them).