Cooper Tires has been expanding its crossover tire offerings, which makes a ton of sense since everyone’s buying crossovers.
Cooper claims this Discoverer SRX is a versatile all-season touring tire for crossovers and SUVs and they come in a lot of different sizes, so if you have a compact crossover, a light duty truck, or a Ford Explorer like we used for this tire review, they will have a size to fit.
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All the Details
These Discoverer SRX tires come in 43 different sizes and are available anywhere from 16 to 22 inches in diameter. Pricing will be about $140 each on Amazon. Cooper says this touring tire is good for all-season performance, long tread life, more ride comfort and improving efficiency. What’s the secret? This tire uses more silica, which makes the tire more flexible in its abilities and under more diverse conditions to offer more grip and less rolling resistance. The tread wear life is 65,000 miles and Cooper does a 45-day free test drive, so if you don’t like the tires, you should be able to just return them, which is a pretty good guarantee.
The first thing you notice about the tire is that it has a lot of spies, which should help give the tires more grip in wet conditions by squeegeeing water away from the tire’s contact patch.
ALSO SEE: Cooper Discoverer STT Pro Tire Review
The SRXs also have a special edge that’s designed to help the tires get better traction in the snow. The edge has grooves that are made to trap snow inside to give you better traction because snow on snow will give you more grip than snow on bare tire.
The tire also has a five-rib tread pattern that is supposed to evenly distribute the load across the tire’s contact patch, which should result in better handling, even tread wear, and more responsiveness from the tires.
In addition to that, these tires have a StabilEdge side wall, which Cooper says will make for better dry road traction. It also enhances steering precision while providing a better feel for the road.
First Impressions
During our review, we were experiencing some torrential downpour, which gave me an opportunity to see how the tires performed in terrible weather. The tires bite pretty hard when it’s wet out and were able to handle emergency maneuvers without any drama, just like they did when the pavement was dry. Driving around on the highway in the pouring rain, there was no hydroplaning and the tires felt really solid.
ALSO SEE: Cooper CS5 Ultra Touring Tire Review
Cooper says these tires should provide more steering feel, but I didn’t really notice a difference from the stock tires. I did notice that these tires were a bit noisier and a bit harsher riding than the stock tires that came on this Explorer, but it’s not bad enough to be a deal breaker at all.
The Verdict: Cooper Discoverer SRX Tire Review
These tires work really well in ideal, dry conditions and in the pouring rain, but the real test will be to see how they perform during a snowfall. Having dedicated winter tires is always what we recommend, but if you drive an SUV or crossover and live in an area that doesn’t see heavy snow or extremely cold weather, the Cooper Discoverer SRX tires are sure to do the trick as a solid all-rounder.
