Lifted Subaru all terrain tires... P or LT what is the difference?

Hey!... Welcome to #modmonday where we discuss one of the mods on either of my Subarus. This week we will discuss tire choices for the lifted Subaru, specifically P metric tires and LT tires.  

These have been propelling my Forester a little over two and half years without a hitch.

After lifting my Forester there were many decisions to make about my tires... with many brands, sizes and widths the decision can be quite tough. I wanted a size that filled up the wheel well but one that didn't burden the car. One of those decisions is P tires versus Lt tires. Lets take a look the differences and what the letters mean.

We will start off with the LT or light truck tire. These are heavy duty vs Passenger tires that come with more tread, plies and weight. With these attributes you will gain a lot of durability and the ability to carry more loads. On the other side you likely lose a few mpgs and a bit of a rougher ride with the extra plies and weight. 

I really wanted these Bridgestone tires until doing my research on LT vs P.

Now a Passenger tire has less belts and less weight and made for standard cars carrying typical loads.  This made the most sense to me when choosing. As much as I would love to be out enjoying the back roads every hour of every day I know this is my daily and will need to perform well on the pavement as well as the dirt. As stated above you won't have the carrying capacity of a LT or the durability.

Not as tough as an LT but they fill my needs for on road and off road.

When you add LT tires to a vehicle that comes standard with P tires you will find the suspension, brakes and engine/trans have to make up the differences which are mostly weight related. The heavier tire will now take more energy to get moving, more stopping power to bring the vehicle to a stop and the suspension now has much more weight to control. These are all areas that should be upgraded in the future to help keep up with the larger tires.

It wasn’t long after installing the larger tires that I upped the power with a bit more boost to help the Forester leave stop lights. After that I was on to better performing brakes to help slow down the much heavier tires.

It didn’t take long for me to up the engine performance after adding the larger tires.

Soon after the stock brakes were deemed unworthy and were upgraded too.

All terrain (A/T) tires can come in both P metric and LT versions, determined by your build either will be a great choice. Just take in to account what the vehicle's primary use will be and go from there. Even with my A/t tires being Passenger tire version, they are still significantly stiffer than my factory sized tires and my Forester has seen many upgrades to help deal with the larger tires.

A little side by side comparison. A/t on the left and factory sized snow tire on the right.

Here we stack them up and you can see just how much more tire the A/ts are.

Thoughts, comments, questions? Leave them below.