These retractable studded tires may save our roads, our ears, and our lungs

If you want to feel truly invincible when driving in the snow, you need a set of studded snow tires. It’s illegal in some places, and usually limited to the colder months of the year in others. However, set out in a group, and they will see you through the worst, slipperiest, snowiest driving conditions you can imagine.

It comes at a very significant cost, and I’m not just talking about a financial cost. Yes, good quality tires with tungsten tips are generally much more expensive than average quality rubber tires with icicles on the sidewall. But the biggest problem is that they can be very loud and are much worse for the roads and even the lungs than regular rubber.

Nokian, the Finnish company that has been making high-grip Scandinavian-spec tires since the 1930s, has a new solution that stems directly from James Bond movie – Or Two filmsAs it was. The company’s new Hakkapeliitta 01 frames feature studs that retract when not needed. Can they reduce the problems of other studded snow tires enough to make them worth the investment? Too bad my Aston was in the shop, so I put a set on my Subaru, a 2004 Impreza WRX STI, to find out.

You’re probably familiar with a certain other similar Finnish company: Nokia. This is no coincidence. Both were born from the same company, Nokia, whose roots go back to the late 19th century.

Tire company Nokian has been manufacturing the Hakkapeliitta line of snow tires for 90 years. The most recent one was called Hakkapeliitta 10, and was released in 2021, but now Hakkapeliitta 01 resets the numbering system.

This makes sense because while Hakkas has seen incremental improvements from generation to generation, the latter represents a major transformation. I can say this with confidence because I’ve personally been running and racing Nokian tires for over a decade, ever since the Hakkapeliitta 7, and do my best to ignore snide comments from friends and family about how incredibly loud they are.

If you’ve never driven on studded snow tires, at low speeds the sound is a bit like popcorn kernels popping in your bumpers while cruising through parking lots. It’s a loud, unpleasant sound, settling into a more subtle roar at highway speeds, but it never goes away.

For the Hakkapeliitta EV’s electric drive tires, Nokian has alleviated this problem with some success by placing an insulating foam liner inside the tire and reducing the number of studs. As for Hakkapeliitta 01, it’s a whole different ball game.

The distinctive feature of the new Hakkapeliitta 01 is, of course, its screws. Or more specifically, what Nokian calls the “adaptive base” underneath the screw. This is designed to allow the stud to retract into the tire tread when temperatures are warm while keeping it protruding when it is cold.

Interestingly, it is not related to the ambient temperature. “The pins come off when the car is stationary,” Mikko Liukola, Nokian’s development director, tells me. “When the tire moves along bare roads at moderate to high speeds, repeated contact between the studs and the road warms the adaptive tread. Even in cold temperatures, this movement softens the adaptive tread and pulls the studs into the tread.”

If you drive over frozen surfaces, like ice or snow, Leucola says the cold temperatures will cause that base to harden, keeping those nails extended.

The goal of all this is partly to reduce noise, by up to one decibel per Nokian’s tests, but it’s also about reducing road wear. Nokian says the Hakkapeliitta 01 provides 30 percent less dry road wear than traditional studded tires. This may not seem like an insignificant factor for a winter-only tire, but even in Minnesota, The study showed Drivers do about 70 percent of their winter driving on dry asphalt.

Reducing road wear significantly reduces your vehicle’s overall emissions. Airborne particles are a major factor in lung cancer rates globally, and these airborne particles generated when a metal nail hits dry asphalt are particularly bad. Countries like Japan have banned studded tires completely, not because of the damage to the roads, but because of the damage to the lungs.

From the outside, the new studs look very different from the ones on the Hakkapeliitta 10 tires I’ve been using recently on my Subaru. These studs are placed a little differently too, with their placement in the frames algorithmically determined to reduce noise according to Liukkula.

Where the Hakkapeliitta 10’s studs are small and self-contained, you can see a cushion of sorts behind the studs on the 01s, making it easier for them to magically disappear into the tire tread. The tire tread features micro-stripes, sipes in the spokes, to increase the surface area and make the most of the grip available on slippery surfaces.

But the Hakkapeliitta tires always excelled on slippery surfaces. For this test, I was much more interested in seeing if they lived up to their billing on dry asphalt.

Before I hit the road, I left one of my Hakkapeliitta out on an 18 degree evening to make sure it was good and cool. The other I took indoors, where it maintained an ambient temperature of 65 degrees. In the morning, I took a dynamometer for each and measured the force required to compress the nail against the tire tread.

Sure enough, compared to the cold tire, the studs on the warm tire provided roughly half the resistance. Once they were pressed, they were in no hurry to come back.

So, early signs pointed to the legitimacy of the flag, and this was verified when I put the wheels and tires on the car and drove away. The ubiquitous popcorn sound that embodies the studded snow tire experience has not been completely eliminated, but it has been significantly reduced. I can still hear the sounds of the buttons on the dry asphalt, but only if I listen to them.

As I increased my speed, the improvement was noticeable again. Before fitting the Hakkapeliitta 01s tires, I did a few laps on one of my test tracks on my set of Hakkapeliitta 10s tires, and I could immediately hear the difference in the new tires.

Plus, on wet roads, the new Haakaa felt safer and more stable, and while these tires unfortunately arrived too late for me to take them out on the glare ice, they did get a quick blast in some late-season flurries, and they made my car feel as invincible as ever.

So the technology actually works. Although they’re far from silent, Nokian’s new Hakkapeliitta studded tires are considerably quieter than those the company has launched before. But it will come at a cost. Nokian hasn’t specified pricing for the Hakkapeliitta 01 tires, but it’s certain that they will cost at least as much as the Hakkapeliitta 10 tires they replace, which cost about $200 per corner in the 17-inch size that Subaru is asking for.

Studless snow tires from brands like Dunlop or Falken can be had for less than half that amount. Worth the premium? You’ll have to weigh quality of life and environmental improvements against your tire budget, but whatever Nokian will charge for the tires will almost certainly be far less than what Q Branch would charge for a set.