General Grabber A/TX Review

General Grabber A/TX is an extreme variant of the Grabber family by General. The tire provides slightly more aggressive design compared to it’s other siblings. But it’s interlocking design actually resembles the famous KO2 a lot, as you’ll see in the appearance section below.

Being a tire engineer, from my perspective, the General Grabber A/TX really breaks the norm, that all terrain tires are not good on roads. The tire despite being so aggressive, provides a very comfortable on road experience with good amount of braking and handling control. The extra layer underneath its rubber provides additional comfort and sidewall lugs offer you with a nice supporting traction off road. The tire is also great on snow and is awarded with 3pmsf rating and is stud-able as well.

Things that most impressive about this tire:

• Amazing tread wear life without losing much traction on and off pavements.
• Very good with deep snow, even up to 2 feet of snow is no problem for this tire.

Where the tire needs some improvements:

• Wet handling and traction of the tire can be improved.
• Tread noise of the tire is a little loud considering other all terrain tires.

Tread Appearance

Let’s move things from shoulders. The General Grabber A/TX has staggered blocks here and they form nice lugs on the sidewalls.

Large lateral spacing separating those blocks have enough room to accommodate stone ejectors between all of them.

The shoulder blocks are seen with notches which resembles the inner blocks, though can’t say same about siping as you can see its more interlocking in the middle.

But all of them are full depth, so even with wear, they won’t go away.

Out of 3 ribs in the middle the surrounding two have stud-holes like seen on shoulders and they wrap up in a way to make interconnected web of grooves.

Also, I do like the white letters on the sidewalls, although you do have the option to hide them by putting the other sidewall out, as the tire has a symmetric tread design.

Info About Sizes

The General Grabber A/TX provides 14″,15″,16″,17″,18″,19″,20″ rim sizes. Here one thing to note is that, the 14″ is only available in one size, LT 27X8.50R14, by the way it comes with max tread depth of 16/32.

Total weight range of this tire goes from 29 lbs (of 14″), to 75 lbs seen in LT 37X13.50R20

Furthermore, overall total sizes are 60, and they have speed ratings, in Q, R, S and T, while the load ratings are available in SL, XL, C, D and E

For Your Info: For a comfortable on road ride, I’d recommend going with D (load range).

Compare General Grabber A/TX with others

• Falken Wildpeak AT3w
• BF Goodrich KO2
• Sumitomo Encounter A/T
• Nitto Recon Grappler
• Nitto Terra Grappler G2
• Firestone Destination X/T
• Goodyear Wrangler Duratrac
• Hankook Dynapro AT2

Tread Life

Now for the fun part. I have ranked this tire for the best spot in terms of wear (in my list of all terrain tires).

Out of all the tires I’ve had experience with, this gave out the best life.

So there are a couple of factors to consider here. When it comes to wear, there are two things, one is how well is the tire maintains its performance with wear, and second, how much time it takes for the tire to wear off.

And General Grabber A/TX does both things right, it ages well and wears slower. Even with testing I’ve managed to get 50k out of these boys.

The tire has a harder compound which is stiffer and although it provides on road stability, it also ensures a good resistance to wear and promotes even wearing.

The strong kevlar rubber of the tire is also made sightly elastic, so it provides further resistance to wear.

The tire’s tread depth also plays a huge role in how long it would last, and Grabber A/TX provides you with 16″/32 and this further increases the time for these tire to wear down.

For Your Info: The lower load range sizes even do better as they generate less heat in the tread, minimizing damage. Also as the Grabbers get balanced very good, this further aids to it’s even wear.

Dry Performance

All terrain tires mostly lack on highways and pavements, but the General Grabber A/TX stands aside from the crowd with its nice manners on road.

I personally am in love with it’s steering response. Even when you take sharp turns while cornering, there is a very little to no lag in between the input of your steering wheel and the handling feedback.

Dry Traction

The General Grabber A/TX is a very vocal tire, where even slight changes can be felt on the wheels.

It’s considerable dry handling is credited to it’s good rubber to road contact and full depth sipes, especially on the shoulders.

These sipes give good elasticity to the blocks allowing them to flex according to the handling orientation.

Also as these sipes are not edge to edge, or in other words, they don’t divide the blocks down like they do in the middle, they are firm enough to ensure a stable on road grip.

But even without them the tire is pretty firm. It’s compound is harder when compared to other all terrain tires.

For Your Info: I was really impressed by how well these tires balance out and once balanced, stay that way for a good amount of time.

Wet Traction

General Grabber A/TX could use some wet grip. Where it so good on dry, wet pavements becomes a slight of a challenge for this tire.

And I am talking about both the grip and handling here (the two parts of traction).

For the grip, the tire does not offer flexibility to it’s central sipes to work with water.

And during handling, it really lacks in the lateral traction department, where a lot of side-way slippage is seen.

The sipes are not interlocking on the shoulders, and they almost provide no lateral aid. Plus the compound of the tire is harder and sipes further loose wiping abilities.

For Your Info: General Grabber A/TX even lacks behind it’s mud terrain variant, the Grabber X3, on wet roads. It shows up with larger braking distances and takes more time on laps during handling calculations.

Hydroplaning

One of the wet highway component often under-estimated is hydroplaning. And the General Grabber A/TX brings a very noticeable aquaplaning resistance here.

It’s float speeds are quite incredible on both straight and curved highways.

The tire makes a web of channels throughout the tire, so water beneath it’s tread gets evenly distributed all over it’s grooves as it gushes out.

These channels also offer a good depth to them as well. The tire provides 16″/32 tread depth on most of its sizes and this further assists the water moving out by providing it with deeper valleys.

Ride Quality

There are two dimensions of ride quality, there’s on-road tread noise, and then there’s comfort, which tells how well the tire is able to absorb the vibrations on the rough as well as smooth surfaces.

Let’s check them out on Grabber A/TX with details.

Tread Noise

Noise is something, I would not worry too much with this tire, as it tackles on road noise pretty well.

The Grabber A/TX offers variable pitches all across it’s tread. This allows this tire to have less acoustic characteristics.

Most of the noise comes in from the shoulder blocks, it’s just air flowing out and in of the tire. And with its random blocks placements, it’s able to cancel out the frequencies of sound waves and tread noise levels are significantly dampened.

You are not going to hear much, below 50 mph, even with your windows down and nothing playing on speakers. And after 50mph you may notice a slight humming sound that is not too distracting.

But one thing to note is that, these tires starts to produce some tread noise after 10k miles, but balancing them out would do the trick.

Impact Comfort

Ride comfort is not just important for all terrain tires, as its just a requirement of every tire out there. But as the tires get more aggressive, they start to lose their comfort tendencies.

That’s why mud terrain tires provide very lack of comfort (on pavements especially).

General Grabber with it’s newer more aggressive tire, the A/TX, compared to its sibling, the Grabber AT2, has a dedicated layer beneath its rubber, which focuses on ride quality significantly.

The tire also provides a slightly stiffer compound for traction and tread wear purposes, and without that layer the ride would be stiffer.

With it’s comfort dedicated inner construction, it’s tread is able to take on bumps as they are efficiently dissipated throughout it’s tread.

The tire also offers good tread depth, so more rubber comes between you and the pavement, providing shocks (from the impacts) more area of tread to flow around.

For Your Info: If comfort is your priority, I’d recommend P metric sizes in case of Grabber A/TX, they have a softer rubber composition comparatively and they also perform better on wet roads, but you would have to compromise a bit on it’s durability with it.

Also with other sizes, comfort is still good enough and you will only feel slight vibrations above 50 mph, but the good thing about them is that they get balanced nicely, so you can further enhance the ride quality with that.

Fuel Efficiency

The General Grabber ATX has a lot of rolling resistance. The tire has a stiffer compound, as already discussed, and this puts a lot of pressure on the surface it’s on, so with this, more fuel is burnt to roll them.

But things are a little better with P rated tires, as they have less rolling resistances. But when it comes to LTs, they get heavier, adding more to pressure.

In case of LTs you can make sure you have optimal air pressure in the tire as this can help with fuel economy. I reached General Tire on this and they told me 43 PSI.

Durability

All Terrain tires are considered tough and that has very little to do with their tread as most of the durability of these tires comes form their inner construction.

In case of this tire, it offers a very common construction as seen with other all terrain tires.

The inner most layer of this tire has the cover made out of polyester, it’s 2 ply (2 layers you can say). This cover is then layered with 2 belts made out of steel cords (they have high tensile strength and prevents these rugged tires to get punctured from the middle).

These steel belts are further layered with 2 more layers of nylon, where the tire’s outer rubber sits.

So overall you get a very strong middle construction of 2+2+2 layers, while the sidewalls get to be just 2 ply.

(That’s why the sidewalls are considered the weakest part of the sides, as only the polyester casing protects it).

But this tire also has thick enough sidewall lugs as well which further adds reinforcements to it’s durability over there.

For Your Info: Mostly AT tires get to have this type of construction with an exception of a few which even get to have 3 ply sidewall construction (polyester casing) like the BF Goodrich KO2. The 3 ply sidewalls is a norm with mud tires but not all terrain.

Winter Performance

Now out of all terrain tires I reviewed, there were some which were simply unmatched in two departments of performance, and General Grabber A/TX was one of them.

If you checked out my all terrain tires list yet (linked above), I was confused on whether to put this tire up for best wear resistance or snow traction.

The tire performed neck to neck with other big players out there on snow, where Mickey Baja Boss AT really surprised me and was one of them.

But in the end Grabber only lacked slightly to it, I believe, but it was subjective, you can say.

So General Grabber A/TX is still really good on snow.

The tire has a lot of biters which trap the snow and provide good traction values, earning 3 Peak Mountain Snowflake rating symbol.

Off Road Performance

Off road performance with this tire is simply awesome.

The tire even outperforms some of the famous names out there including the BFG KO2 (link contains comparison).

It’s tread design offers a very decent off road crawling abilities.

Sand Driving

Sand is a very loose surface and here more rubber footprint is needed to maximize traction. That’s why the first thing you do on sand is air down your tire.

The good thing about Grabber A/TX is that, even with it’s stiffer rubber compound in the middle, the sidewalls are not too stiff, so they provide better traction when pressured down with their staggered shoulder blocks.

With lose sidewalls, the mud scoops on the sides have better contact with the sand and they keep the tire’s momentum on.

Mud Driving

Mud is usually not a place for all terrain tire to be. In fact, that’s the reason why MTs are made. But this tire still provides you with a good enough traction here, of course not better or even on par with a MT, but compared to others AT, for sure.

The mud scoops of the shoulder blocks where the tire copies it’s mud terrain variant the Grabber X3, really helps the tire here.

But it can only do some much as the central area of the tread with interlocking grooves, doesn’t allow enough mud to pass through with ease.

Traction on Rocks

The General Grabber ATX does everything right to keep it’s performance good on rocky terrains.

This terrain includes sharp rocks, stones, dirt, and gravel and this tire provides all things to handle them.

With sharper rocks although 3 ply sidewalls would have been nicer, the tire still provides you with satisfactory protection where the sidewall lugs further put another layer to save from sharp objects.

In case of stones, the ejectors between each shoulder block don’t let them get lodged in the tread and throw them out as the tire rolls over.

On dirt and gravel, the tire offers very impressive handling where nice handling times are noted.

But the tire does not provide you with good lateral traction and this goes highly for wet rocks. On wet terrains, during climbing mostly, the tire is very prone to slip side-ways.

Take Home Points

The General Grabber A/TX is overall a decent investment of a tire. It provides you with good dry traction, I’m gonna say okay wet traction, nice hydroplaning resistance and is the best when it comes to wear, so it’s going to last a long time.

The siping on this thing is also full depth, so even with wear, they are not going away and you are still going to get traction, that good new.

Bad news is that they are not too good in wet to begin with, so you gonna have to compromise a little bit in this area. And yes, fuel economy is also not going to be impressive either.

Other than this, I am really impressed by how well they perform on snow. The 3 Peak Mountain Snowflake rating symbol is definitely justified on this tire.