Writing about the
Cooper Zeon 4XS Sport given
74% (235-55-19-W)
Driving on
a combination of roads for 1500
average miles
A full set came fitted to the used Mercedes GLC we purchased. After never having heard of these tyres I was pleasantly surprised. Do a little more digging and you find that David Coulthard (yes the F1 driver) endorses these tyres and helped with their development!
They are one of the quietest tyres I have ever experienced - given that's its a Mercedes SUV things are pretty quiet in the cabin anyway, but I noticed that the Goodyear tyres fitted to a similar age/spec/mileage GLC was noticeably harsher and noisier. These tyres have a very unusual dot pattern in between the tread blocks, I can imagine this contributes to noise suppression.
Being an SUV it doesn't get thrown around like a car would. That said you have full confidence flooring the throttle in the wet on these. Acceleration and braking is good enough - being a 4matic it's more difficult to break traction anyway compared to a FWD SUV and these tyres seem to work very well on the GLC.
Wear is probably the only drawback - in the few months I've driven on them (around 4mm tread when we got the car) I'm starting to see bald shoulders on the front tyres, this is the design of the blocks and the rest of the tyre still has 3.5mm+ and the tyres have been correctly inflated.
The tyres don't seem to offer a great deal of rim protection either although at a 55% SUV profile this is less of an issue than say a 30% profile. The top brands seem to have a thicker rim protection flange which in my opinion looks quite good.
I get the sense that it's a very soft compound, excellent grip and a low noise tread design at the expense of wear. Goodyears and Pirelli's most likely will last longer, but they are more expensive (Cooper's available around £90 a corner) and noticeably harsher (in terms of noise and comfort).
As the vehicle has a remote monitoring app it's the first time I've been able to monitor tyre pressures over the course of a few months daily. It's been very interesting to see the pressures drop as much as 4psi over 10deg C, I'm not sure if all tyres would vary to the same degree.
All in all, would definitely buy these tyres again. Once you've had a quiet tyre fitted to an SUV it's very difficult to swap to anything noisier. The dB rating for this tyre is 70dB but it feels more like 68dB.