Winter tyres need storing carefully, badly stored tyres will negate any safety benefit. Our winters are generally mild and wet, they offer less braking and steering performance in heavy rain conditions which you are far more likely to encounter in the winter in the UK than snow and ice and unusually wet winter events (when you really do want maximum tyre performance are often also caused by unusually warm wet air being pulled over the gulf stream.
Most of the advice you will see online is from sources with an interest in selling you a 2nd set of tyres or regurtated advice from those same sources.
There is no denying that winter tyres offer vastly superior performance when its icy or low single digit temperatures but there's considerable overalap in the margins above that. Bear in mind it really isn't that uncommon for temperatures to reach double digits in the UK even in the depths of winter at which point summer tyres are suddenly significantly safer again.
Don't get me wrong, there is still a solid case to be made for winter tyres, especially for drivers who live in rural areas and who might regularly drive on untreated roads, but when you consider the negative effect of winter tyres on road noise and range and ironically in many situations safety, along with the additional cost of storage and fitting, for those of us who live and drive around towns and cities (which many if not most of us EV owners do) they are not really worth either the effort or expense of buying or fitting.
For those of you lucky enough to have two sets of tyres I'd actually recommend summer and cross climate tyres, or for those who are concerned and who dont want to swap, cross climate all year round.
I am now being flippant, but there's a also a parallel observation to be made about winter tyre advocates to ICE drivers worried about the anual trip to aunt Martha's at the other end of the country ....
