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

If you want to feel truly invincible when driving in the snow, you need a set of studded snow tires. They’re illegal in some places, typically restricted to the frigid months of the year in others. Spring for a set, though, and they’ll see you through the worst, slipperiest, snowiest driving conditions you can imagine.

They come at a pretty substantial cost, though, and I’m not just talking about a financial one. Yes, quality tires with embedded tungsten tips are generally far pricier than your average bargain rubber with snowflakes on the sidewall. The bigger issue, though, is that they can be extremely loud and are substantially worse for the roads and even your lungs than regular rubber.

Nokian, the Finnish company that’s been making high-grip, Nordic-spec tires since the 1930s, has a novel solution that’s straight from a James Bond movie — or two movies, as it were. The company’s new Hakkapeliitta 01 tires feature studs that retract when not needed. Can they reduce the other studded snow tire headaches enough to make them worth the investment? Sadly my Aston is in the shop, so I put a set on my Subaru, a 2004 Impreza WRX STI, to find out.

Chances are you’re more familiar with a certain other, similar-sounding Finnish company: Nokia. That’s no coincidence. Both were born from the same business, Nokia Corporation, which has roots going back to the late 19th century.

Nokian, the tire company, has been making its Hakkapeliitta line of snow tires for 90 years now. The most recent was called the Hakkapeliitta 10, released in 2021, but now the Hakkapeliitta 01 resets the numbering scheme.

It makes sense because, while Hakkas have seen gradual improvements from one generation to the next, this latest marks a major shift. I can say that confidently because I’ve been personally running and racing Nokian tires for well over a decade, since the Hakkapeliitta 7, doing my best to ignore the snide comments from friends and family about how incredibly loud they are.

If you’ve never driven on studded snow tires, at lower speeds the sound is a little bit like popcorn kernels exploding in your fenders as you roll around through the parking lots. It’s loud and unpleasant, settling into a more subtle roar at highway speeds, but never going away.

For its electric-minded Hakkapeliitta EV tires, Nokian mitigated this with some success by putting a foam insulating liner inside the tire and reducing the number of studs. For the Hakkapeliitta 01, though, it’s a completely different ball game.

The hallmark of the new Hakkapeliitta 01 is, of course, its studs. Or, more specifically, what Nokian calls the “adaptive base” that sits beneath the stud. This is designed to allow the stud to retract into the tread of the tire when the temperatures are warm yet keep it protruding when it’s cold.

Interestingly, though, it’s not really about the ambient temperature. “The studs are out when the vehicle is standing still,” Mikko Liukkula, development manager at Nokian, tells me. “When the tire moves along bare roads at moderate to high speeds, the repeated contact between the studs and the road warms the adaptive base. Even in cold temperatures, this movement softens the adaptive base and retracts the studs into the tread.”

If you’re driving over frozen surfaces, like ice or snow, Liukkula says the colder temperatures will harden that base, keeping those studs extended.

The point of all this is partly noise reduction, to the tune of one decibel per Nokian’s tests, but it’s also about the reduction in road wear. Nokian says the Hakkapeliitta 01 offers a 30 percent reduced wear to dry roads over a typical studded tire. That may not seem an unimportant factor for a tire only used in the winter, but even in Minnesota, a study showed that drivers do roughly 70 percent of their winter driving on dry asphalt.

Reducing road wear substantially reduces your vehicle’s overall emissions. Airborne particulates are a major factor in lung cancer rates globally, and this airborne particulate matter generated when a metal stud strikes dry asphalt is particularly bad. Countries like Japan have outright banned studded tires, not because of the damage to roads, but because of the damage to lungs.

On the outside, the new studs do look quite a bit different than those found in the Hakkapeliitta 10 tires I’d most recently been running on my Subaru. Those studs are positioned slightly differently, too, placement in the tires algorithmically determined to reduce noise according to Liukkula.

Where the Hakkapeliitta 10 studs are small and self-contained, you can see a pad of sorts behind the studs in the 01s, which facilitates their magic disappearing act into the tread of the tire. The tire tread features fine slices, sipes in tire-speak, to increase surface area and make the most of the available grip on slippery surfaces.

But Hakkapeliitta tires have always excelled on slippery surfaces. For this test, I was far more interested in knowing whether they live up to their billing on dry asphalt.

Before I hit the road, I left one Hakkapeliitta outside on an 18-degree evening to make sure it was good and cold. The other I took inside, where it maintained an ambient 65 degrees. In the morning, I took a force gauge to each and measured the force required to compress the stud flush with the tread of the tire.

Sure enough, compared to the cold one, the studs on the warm tire presented roughly half the resistance. And, once compressed, they were in no hurry to come back out again.

So, early signs pointed to the science being legit, and that was verified when I put the wheels and tires on the car and drove away. That omnipresent popcorn sound that typifies the studded snow tire experience was not totally eliminated, but it was dramatically reduced. I could still hear the studs on dry asphalt, but only if I listened for them.

As I picked up speed, again, the improvement was noticeable. Before mounting the Hakkapeliitta 01s, I’d done a few laps of one of my test routes on my set of Hakkapeliitta 10s, and I could immediately hear the difference in the new tires.

Additionally, on wet roads, the new Hakkas felt more secure and planted, and while these tires sadly arrived too late for me to get them out on glare ice, I 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. While far from silent, Nokian’s new studded Hakkapeliitta tires are substantially quieter than those the company has released before. But they will come at a cost. Nokian hasn’t set pricing on the Hakkapeliitta 01 tires, but they’re sure to cost at least as much as the Hakkapeliitta 10 tires they replace, which cost around $200 per corner in the 17-inch fitment my Subaru demands.

Unstudded snow tires from brands like Dunlop or Falken can be had for less than half that. Worth the premium? You’ll have to weigh the quality of life and environmental improvements against your tire budget, but whatever Nokian winds up charging for them, it’ll surely be far less than what Q Branch would demand for a set.