General Grabber HD vs Nokian One H/T tires

For most drivers of pickup trucks and SUVs, highway-terrain tires are really a good all-around choice. Highway-terrain tires for light trucks can be regarded more or less like the truck equivalent of all-season tires for sedans, minivans, and crossovers. They’re designed for great wear properties with generous limited manufacturer’s warranty coverage, a quiet and controlled ride, handling that’s predictable and consistent, year-round traction (in everything but heavy snow), composed road manners, and steering response that’s light and immediate. In other words, highway-terrain tires for light trucks have a lot in common with their all-season passenger tire cousins, but with beefed-up materials and internal design that allow them to easily handle the weight, power, torque, and load rating of light trucks.

In the arena of highway-terrain tires, it’s even better if you can get a set of tires that are robust enough for the demands of commercial service. That’s what we’ve got today in this head-to-head comparison review of the Grabber HD from General and the Nokian One H/T. The General and the Nokian are both commercial-grade tires from premium brands, and both have a lot to recommend for pickup trucks and SUV drivers.

In the course of this comparison review, you’ll see us make reference to the SimpleScore ratings for these two tires. If you’re not familiar with it, SimpleScore is the proprietary rating system that was devised here at the SimpleTire team to give you a quick and easy idea of any tire’s strengths and weaknesses. We look at the tire’s technical details, manufacturer info, specs, customer reviews, and other data points, and then we calculate all that information to a 1-10 numerical value for the categories of traction, handling, and longevity, along with an overall average SimpleScore number. In the case of the General Grabber HD and Nokian One H/T, the SimpleScores shake out like this:

General Grabber HD:

• Traction: 8.2
• Handling: 8.3
• Longevity: 7.3
• Overall average SimpleScore: 7.8

Nokian One H/T:

• Traction: 8.5
• Handling: 8.4
• Longevity: 8.9
• Overall average SimpleScore: 8.6

As you can see, these are both tires that bring a lot to the table and that compare well against each other when it comes to SimpleScore rankings. As handy as SimpleScore is, though, it’s still just a summary – a 30,000 foot view that doesn’t get you down into the weeds and gives you the details on what to expect with a tire. Let’s get in there and get a closer look with this General Grabber HD vs Nokian One H/T tire review:

General Grabber HD tires

Here at the SimpleTire team, we’ve been pretty impressed with just about every product in the General Tire lineup, and the Grabber HD is loaded with great features that make it a strong performer. It starts out with General’s proprietary Duragen Tech tread formulation, a tough rubber compound that’s cut-and-chip resistant yet stays flexible for traction, even in subfreezing weather. The Grabber HD’s StabiliTred design means a bigger, flatter footprint for enhanced traction and handling, plus even wear and improved braking performance. The Grabber HD is designed for durability, too; Sidewall Curb Guard reinforces the sidewall against curb rash, cuts, and punctures, and its internal design includes a polyester casing with twin high tensile steel belts and a nylon cap ply for high-speed stability. While the Grabber HD doesn’t come from the factory with a limited manufacturer’s tread life warranty, testing shows 25% better treadwear properties compared to the competition. Traction and handling are priorities as well; the symmetric 3-rib tread pattern of the Grabber HD is designed for extra stiffness, and rigid shoulder blocks help to improve handling and stability, even when towing or heavily loaded. Four deep circumferential zigzag grooves work with sipes and independent tread blocks to evacuate water and slush from the contact patch and resist hydroplaning. The zigzag continuous center rib of the Grabber HD helps deliver sharp and quick steering response as well as dead-solid stability at highway speed, and the low rolling resistance design helps to cut fuel costs over the life of the tire. SimpleTire’s price on the General Grabber HD starts at $129.99 per tire.

Nokian One H/T tires

Nokian is a Finland-based tire manufacturer ( the same parent company as Nokia phones) that’s built a reputation on their winter tires that are designed to handle the rigors of a Scandinavian winter. The One H/T is a tough highway-terrain tire that’s designed for enhanced durability with Aramid fibers in the sidewall, a long-wearing tread compound and stone ejectors built into the base of the tread grooves that protect the casing by easily shedding rocks, dirt, and debris. Nokian covers the Nokian One H/T with a 55,000 mile limited manufacturer’s tread life warranty (70,000 miles for P-Metric sizes). The Nokian One H/T’s very strong SimpleScore for traction is thanks to a set of circumferential grooves, lateral grooves and sipes that all form a system to divert water away from the tire’s contact patch and resist hydroplaning. At highway speed, Nokian’s Silent Groove technology negates certain frequencies and harmonics to keep road noise down. The 3D sipes multiply the tread’s surface area and traction with hundreds of hair-thin slits that slice and chew through snow and slush. The Aramid-reinforced sidewall and shoulder, along with robust internal construction and a long-wearing tread compound give the Nokian One H/T the durability that makes it a great choice for commercial service. SimpleTire’s price on the Nokian One H/T starts at $134.34 per tire.

General Grabber HD vs Nokian One H/T tires on traction

So how do the General Grabber HD and Nokian One H/T stack up against each other when it comes to traction? It’s a close one – real close. The General gets a very strong SimpleScore of 8.2 for traction, but the Nokian edges it out with an 8.5. While neither tire is suitable for very much off-road use and neither tire has the Three Peak Mountain Snowflake rating for severe winter service, the advanced tread compound of the Nokian helps to boost wet-weather performance as well as enhancing wear properties. Its 12.5/32” initial tread depth gives it excellent grip in wet or light wintry conditions, and the network of sipes, lateral grooves, and circumferential grooves give the Nokian strong resistance to hydroplaning on wet roads. While the General and the Nokian both have similar designs and traction features, the customer reviews were enough to move the needle on this SimpleScore category, and the customers are telling us:

ADVANTAGE: Nokian One H/T

General Grabber HD vs Nokian One H/T tires on handling

It’s just axiomatic that if a tire can’t get good traction, then handling is going to suffer. It makes sense, because if your tires aren’t getting good purchase as you enter a turn, you’re going to experience understeer as the front end plows ahead, or oversteer as the rear end kicks out, and possibly problems with control. With that in mind, the Nokian is again ahead by a bit in the SimpleScore ratings for handling, with an 8.4 vs an 8.3 for the General. Customer reviews do point to capable and composed handling and steering response for both tires, with good braking performance and road manners, but the Nokian does edge out the Grabber once again in this category. Our call:

ADVANTAGE: Nokian One H/T

General Grabber HD vs Nokian One H/T tires on longevity

In the longevity category, there’s a pretty big disparity in SimpleScore rankings for these tires, with the Nokian’s very respectable 8.9 vs 7.3 for the General. There’s an easy answer for that, as the Nokian has a 55,000 mile limited manufacturer’s tread life warranty, vs no mileage warranty coverage for the General (although General does back their tire with substantial protections). Our decision:

ADVANTAGE: Nokian One H/T

When to use each

When it comes to the best application for tires like the General Grabber H/D or Nokian One H/T, there are a couple of questions you should probably ask yourself about your actual needs in a set of highway-terrain tires. If you have to handle nasty winter weather every year, the kind of weather that drops several inches of snow on the roads for days at a time, you might be better off with dedicated winter tires because highway-terrain tires aren’t going to dependably get the job done for you. If, on the other hand, you need a set of tires that’ll deliver strong traction in everything but heavy snow, with the kind of ride quality, road manners and low noise that would be great on a long Interstate trip, the Nokian and the General could both be great choices. The same applies if you occasionally need to take a trip to an unimproved job site, haul heavy loads, tow heavy trailers or drive a delivery or service route with lots of stop and start driving – in other words, the typical needs of commercial vehicles. If this sounds like your situation, the General Grabber HD and Nokian One H/T could both be great choices for you.

Which one should you choose?

So here’s the moment of truth, as always. The General and the Nokian are both very capable tires that compare well against each other in all the SimpleScore categories except for longevity. So close in scoring, in fact, that they’re nearly interchangeable with each other with the exception of warranty coverage. That said, don’t be scared off by the lack of a mileage warranty with the General; General does back this tire with a six-year workmanship and materials warranty with extra coverage available, and its robust materials and construction mean that this is a tire that you can depend on for a long time to come. So let’s compare prices, then: SimpleTire’s price on the General starts at $129.99 per tire, vs $134.34 per tire for the Nokian. There’s not a lot of price gap to talk about there, so we’d just phrase it this way: we’d probably go with the Nokian One H/T, but there’s nothing that would stop us from going with the General Grabber HD either.

Still not sure which tire to buy? Fortunately, SimpleTire is here to help, and our helpful agents will be more than happy to assist you in selecting the right tire for your ride and budget.