Best All-Terrain Tires for Trucks and SUVs

Chris Doane AutomotiveCar and Driver

For everything you need to know about buying and maintaining tires, click here.

Miles deep into the wild where pavement and civilization cease, your vehicle is no longer just a conduit for fun, it’s your lifeline. Whether you’re challenging the Icelandic void or sightseeing on a badly rutted mountainous trail in Arizona the ability of your four-wheel-drive to get you there and back rests—literally—on your choice of all-terrain tires. A Prius can take loose gravel, dirt, and mild inclines without much fuss. It’s when the surface gets gnarly that you need a dedicated off-road tire.

Related: Do You Need to Replace Your Tires?

All-Terrain tires (sometimes designed as A/T or M/T for mud-terrain) generally employ a combination of reinforced sidewalls, tread depth that can range up to twice as deep as a street tire, Kevlar liners, and knobby construction. If you’re looking for an all-terrain tire for your pickup truck, SUV, or Crossover, you’ve come to the right place.

We’ve consulted with our friends at Tire Rack to examine some of the top all terrain tire options. Tire Rack is notorious for its testing and evaluation procedures, and we trust them to help our readers find the best tire, no matter what style they’re after.

Today we’re focusing on the ever-popular all-terrain tire. Read on to learn the highs, lows, advantages, drawbacks, and other valuable insights.

Which All-Terrain Tires are Best For Your Vehicle?

In the past, pickup trucks were made for work: hauling, towing—and getting dirty. It’s no secret, though, that today’s pickup truck is far more than a simple workhorse. With stylish design packages, gas-saving powerplants, and plush interiors, trucks have become far more useful than ever—while still being able to work hard when you need them to.

Today’s SUVs and crossovers are no different. Initially packaged as a more comfortable and driveable utilitarian option to the passenger van, they can tote around groups of passengers in comfort while still providing the cargo capacity and rugged ability that severe weather, urban driving, and the occasional dirt road can bring—with a lot more style than an old Econoline could ever offer.

Both pickups and SUVs thrive on doing everything well, no matter what’s asked of them. To fully achieve that ability, though, an all-terrain tire is essential.

Related: New Tire Buying Guide: Everything You Need to Know

You may want an all-terrain tire you can trust in extreme weather or occasional rough terrain. When you’re the family driver, that trust is critical. Alternatively, you may need a tire for biting off rocks and slugging through sand, such as the BFGoodrich All Terrain T/A KO2 that has proven worthy in the Baja 1000. Specialized tires like the Nokian Rockproof and Firestone Destination M/T2 are so adept in mud that they feel like paddles.

All-terrain tires deliver on both counts. These are the kind of tires that you can bash, squeeze, and shimmy over the rocks and through the dirt without incessantly worrying about punctures. They’re also the kind of tire that can ride in relative quiet and comfort for everyone inside the cabin. And while no tire is immune to failure, all-terrain tires provide the extra measure of grip and grit required in the toughest conditions.

No matter what kind of all-terrain tire you want for your truck, SUV, Jeep, crossover, or, yes, beloved passenger van, there’s one at TireRack that will suit your needs.

All-Terrain Tires Bring Compromises

Back on the road, the most severe all-terrain tires will be noisy with lots of humming on the highway. They don’t have the dry road grip of all-season tires. And they will probably wear out more quickly versus the all-season truck tires like the Goodyear Eagle F1 fitted to various Land Rovers or the Bridgestone Dueler H/T found on the Jeep Wrangler Sahara. Such street-tuned tires have more chops than their smoother appearance would suggest (we’ve actually crawled up the Continental Divide in a fleet of Range Rovers on those 21-inch Goodyears).

In the middle ground are tires like the Goodyear Wrangler Duratrac or All-Terrain Adventure, which provide a worthy off-road upgrade without totally sacrificing on-road comfort. Do your homework and you’ll be able to find the right all-terrain shoes that are best for you and your vehicle.

How We Chose The Tires Listed Here

We turned to the vehicle manufacturers that offer trucks and SUVs with serious off-road capability to see which all-terrain tires they use as standard equipment. The automakers’ engineers work closely with tire manufacturers to develop all-terrain tires that meet rigorous requirements for off-road performance, on-road ride-and-handling, noise level, resistance to punctures, wear, quality, and cost.