My Bridgestone Ecopia tires (on it from the dealer) have a surprisingly high amount of grip.
Bridgestone's have been amazing for me. Quiet, great traction in all weathers, and good tread wear. A little stiffer than other tires maybe but I prefer the handling anyway.
I have lived in the snowiest city on earth (Valdez, AK) as well as the UP of Michigan and now in Maine and I've always used the Dunlop Winter Sport M3's with great results. I will keep using these (or Winter Sport 3D for larger wheels) as long as they make them.
I am running Dunlop wintersport 3D's on my Mk6 GTI and regularly take it through some really nasty stuff to go skiing here in CO. I will likely buy Dunlop winters again. They are my first winter tires, but they seem to perform well. They are on their 3rd winter, I think, and they still mange to get me around just fine. The only times I ran into issues was when I was trying to go up steep grades from a stop on very slick roads, but that is more to do with the lack of AWD than the tire. They also perform well in the dry, even on some of our testing mountain roads here.
I'm on my 4th set of blizzaks, and the new ws-80 are a huge improvement over previous versions. The older tires were terrible on dry/rain with a mushy feel. The WS-80 drive much more like an all-season. I drive aggressively, and these are very confidence inspiring no matter what the road surface is like. I took them out on snow/ice/slush for the first time last weekend and they were fantastic, not a single hiccup on the way to Mt. Hood Meadows.
If you don't have a lot of actual ice and snow, the Dunlop Wintersport tires are fantastic. They're like a performance winter tire. I've had Nokian, Toyo, Bridgestone, Michelin, Dunlop - all have pro's and con's but for performance the Wintersport tires have been far superior as they still have excellent dry weather grip for aggressive driving.
These I am running on my 7 R actually (225/40/18) and had them on my 6 R as well for the last winter. I can highly recommend this tire cause it's good in wet and snowy conditions and in addition very 'sporty' (for a winter tire) if you have dry conditions in winter. Probably the best winter tire I ever had.
I'll repeat the recommendation for the General Arctic Altimax and currently have them on my 2012 Golf. My previous Audi A4 had Blizzaks in the winter, they handled poorly (soft sidewalls) and wore very quickly but stuck well in our wet snow.
I'll never use Dunlop again, although I had the SP Sports as OEM on the GLI not the Signature. They ran like garbage, had a horrible lifespan, and provided no benefit above the Generals I have now. Yet they are much pricier.
A friend of mine put a set of those on her Mazda5, in 16\". While I didn't find any issues with it not tracking straight, they did wear quickly, and yet somehow had very little traction. I'm talking \"light them up the whole way through an intersection in a stock Mazda5\" levels of non-grip. Garbage tires.
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