The South Korean Kumho Crugen HP71 is a Crossover/SUV Touring All-Season tire. It’s well engineered to provide a comfortable ride, good-enough handling, and all-season traction, including in light snow. Let’s check these out in detail.
Table of Contents
Available Tire Sizes
Kumho Crugen HP71 comes in 16 to 22 inches with 54 total sizes, having following specs.
- Speed ratings: H and V.
- Load ratings: SL and XL.
- Weight range: 25 to 43 lbs.
- Tread depth: 10 to 11.5/32″.
- UTQG: 640 A A.
- Treadwear warranty: 65k miles.
Key Takeaway
Overall, the Kumho Crugen HP71 excels in:
- Dry Traction: Superb grip with compact central and shoulder design.
- Wet Performance: Excellent water management with advanced sipes and grooves.
- Noise Reduction: Effective in dampening noise and vibrations through sophisticated tread design.
However, it needs improvements in:
- Winter Traction: Lacks sufficient snow and ice performance, and is missing with 3 peak certification.
- Steering Response: Sluggish due to heavier construction, where it needs better agility.
- Ride Comfort: Stiffer rubber composition and structure affect smoothness and comfort.
Construction Features
The Crugen HP71 comes with a typical symmetrical tread pattern, mostly seen on SUV touring tires.
Here, you can see 5 block columns (called ribs), where the outer two (shoulder ribs), are the widest.
These shoulders are pretty streamlined, with their straight forward, (slightly curving), lateral voids, and linear siping, running parallel to those grooves.
Moreover, to promote comfort, these lugs have ridges placed in between, and for handling, they also have reinforced foundations underneath (with secondary/stiffer rubber layer beneath).
Though these foundational supports are also given to central ribs.
Speaking of which, these 3 ribs (in the tread’s central area), are narrower, and form straight-forward 4 circumferential grooves.
The middle most rib out of them, is almost continuous running, and is characterized with slanted linear siping, connected to notches (facing both sideways directions).
While the adjacent ribs are more aggressive, as they come with both lateral and longitudinal angles/orientations to them, and have more prominent lateral voids, connecting outer longitudinal channels.
And yes, they also feature chamfered edges (which aids tire’s braking performance, for the most part).
Internally, the tire offer two-ply polyester cord body, with two wide steel belts sitting on top of this casing. And those are further reinforced by (2) spirally wrapped nylon cap plies.
Feeling swamped with countless choices for all-season wear? Why don’t you just start here.
Overall Dry Performance
The performance of a tire on dry surfaces is primarily linked with two things, grip and steering response.
And here, the grip itself can be categorized into two types: Linear and lateral traction. Let’s discuss them all one by one.
Linear Grip
Simply put, the tire’s ability to maintain grip in a straight line is known as longitudinal or linear grip. And here the central rib of the tire plays a pivotal role.
This middle area of the tread is crucial because it gets the most weight concentration (as the tire rolls straight) and thus has the most contact with the road, directly affecting the tire’s acceleration and braking capabilities.
Having said that, the Kumho Crugen HP71 offers pretty decent results here.
And this enhanced grip is largely due to its wide and continuous central (most) rib, which is designed to provide uninterrupted contact with the road.
Sure, this rib has notches, but they don’t cut through all the way, laterally, ensuring consistent contact and resulting in superior grip.
And besides these notches provide necessary biting edges, and those combined with multi-directional slits you see on adjacent ribs further boost the tire’s overall longitudinal traction.
However, the tire’s performance isn’t without its limitations, where it can really improve things by employing a lighter overall strcuture (which basically reduces momentum), enhancing tire’s braking efficacy.
Despite this, the Kumho Crugen HP71 still excels in its category, stopping nearly five feet shorter than its direct competitor, the Cooper Endeavor Plus (review).
Overall Handling
Overall handling in a tire combines its lateral grip with its steering capabilities.
For lateral traction, the tire’s shoulders are key, as they engage with the road surface more (due to the centripetal force).
And Kumho’s tire here excels, thanks to its symmetric design with compactly placed shoulder lugs, featuring just lateral siping and grooves, optimizing rubber-to-road contact.
These minimalist shoulder lugs provide this tire with above-average lateral traction (comparing its rivals).
However, this doesn’t necessarily translate into impressive handling lap times, and that’s because the tire offers an okay steering response here only.
There’s a slight delay in feedback when turning the wheel, and it doesn’t feel as quick as some other all-season tires in the category (with similar price range).
This is mainly because of its heavier internal construction, pushing down on lugs, causing them to deform/flex more as the tire corners.
Basically flexing of the lugs introduce the delay (disrupting under/oversteering balance), so the steering appears to be more sluggish, requiring more effort to accurately respond to driver inputs.
Though its still manageable, thanks to the tire’s somewhat stiffer rubber, and reinforced foundations (underneath all ribs).
For Your Info: The overall handling of the Crugen HP71, is very comparable to the Cooper Endeavor Plus. And both of these tires have room for improvements, particularly in steering responsiveness department.
Wet Traction
The overall wet traction depends on how well the tire clear off water in front of it, as it rolls. And this is where the Kumho shines.
In fact wet traction is the tire’s strongest point. And this is attributed to the tire’s well-engineered sipes and grooves.
The 4 circumferential grooves (I talked about in it’s construction section), are pretty wide and interconnected with each other, allowing for pretty fast dispersion of water, leading to superb resistance to hydroplaning.
And while these grooves take out majority of water, the little left over moisture is handled by biters and sipes. These are although mere slits, seemingly, they are very important, as they act as mini water containers/reservoirs.
Basically water being pressed in between the tread and the road, is squeezed in to those slits, creating a relatively drier patch for rubber to grip on.
The Kumho HP71 coming with very effective grooves, leave less water burden on sipes to begin with, improving overall traction.
And sure, this wet traction is relatively better compared to most of the other SUV touring tires in it’s category, there’s still a little room for improvement, where the tire could really benefit from interlocking sipes.
Currently, the tire’s linear sipe structure tends to stiffen during sharp cornering, affecting traction and steering response. This becomes noticeable in extreme conditions where the tire is pushed to its limits, potentially leading to light steering and a tendency for understeering.
Additionally, the tire’s harder rubber composition, with a lower silica content, diminishes the effectiveness of the sipes to some extent too, as that hinders their water soaking abilities.
Winter Performance
The Kumho tire, although marketed as an all-season option, lacks the 3-Peak Mountain Snowflake certification, which basically tell that the tire isn’t able to provide you with good enough acceleration on snowy surfaces.
And so one can guess, that with the absence of tri-peak label, the tire highlights a potential area for improvement, when it comes to overall winter performance.
One significant limitation is the tire’s design regarding multi-directional notches and snow vices.
The Crugen HP71 only features laterally arranged notches, which fall short in providing optimal traction.
Similarly, its sipes are linear, limiting their effectiveness, particularly in cornering scenarios.
Moreover, the tire’s performance is further compromised in freezing temperatures, where its rubber composition is not thermally adaptive, meaning it does not adjust to colder environments, stiffening up tread elements, and decreasing their biting effectiveness.
So these “tread elements” aren’t able to create proper snow-to-snow contact, which is pretty important, because snowflakes naturally adhere to one another, enhancing friction and traction on snowy surfaces.
So yes, overall, one of the main reasons, why Kumho HP71 comes with reduced winter performance is its lack of effective biters.
Noise Comfort
The generation of noise in tires typically occurs when air particles collide with the tread walls, often entering through the shoulder voids.
Now, the Kumho Crugen HP71 effectively addresses this issue with a design that includes connectors or ridges between the shoulder lugs.
These connectors act as a barrier, significantly reducing the amount of air that can penetrate the tread area, thus effectively reducing noise generation at its source.
And although despite these measures, a small amount of air may still enter, here the tire’s harder rubber composition plays a crucial role in managing this residual air noise as well.
This harder rubber of HP71 basically limits in-groove resonance, (which is essentially the echoing of sound waves within the tread grooves).
And with the tire featuring a sophisticated pitch sequencing design, which Kumho refers to as Variable Pitch Technology, that noise further gets dampened down.
This technology involves creating lugs with varying geometries. As a result, when air particles strike these lugs, they produce sound waves at different frequencies, preventing noise amplification.
Road Vibrations Comfort
The comfort of a tire’s ride is largely influenced by its ability to absorb road irregularities. And this capability is significantly determined by both the internal and external structure of the tire.
(This is because generally, tires made from softer materials tend to provide a smoother and less jittery driving experience).
And this is where the Kumho Crugen HP71 needs to improve, as the tire employs a relatively rigid tread rubber, containing a smaller amount of silica in its composition.
Moreover, it also comes with harder cap plies and a stiffer 2 ply polyester casing in its internal construction.
Needless to say, both of these contribute to the tire’s reduced ride quality overall.
Tread Life
The tread life of a tire is primarily determined by the rubber structure and the weight of its overall construction.
And here the Kumho HP71 is above average here.
Now sure the tire weighs a lot, and with heavier structure, lugs are rubber against the road with greater force, the tire still maintains a low rolling resistance.
This is because these lugs do not bend excessively, as they come with reinforced foundations (as discussed in its construction section).
And because of this the tire’s relatively greater tread depth (on average) takes longer to wear down to 2/32″ replacement levels.
So it makes sense why the Crugen HP71 comes with 65k mile warranty here.
Conclusion
In summary, the Kumho Crugen HP71 is not a bad SUV tire after all.
It excels in dry traction due to its robust central rib and compact shoulder blocks.
And in wet conditions, it leads among its direct competitors, especially in terms of traction.
Though it’s winter performance is less impressive, where the tire really lacks in providing adequate snow acceleration.
Other than that, it offers an average overall comfort scores, where its pretty great at dampening noise down, but needs some help regarding lowering impacts/road-imperfections.
This is because of the tire’s robust/rigid inner and outer build. Though it does help the tire with durability and wear, on the other hand.
