I want a quiet car because we routinely do long cross country trips, 2K miles and more. The Pirellis were the first foam lined tires that we’ve had and I was surprised that the 21” Pirellis were actually quieter than than the 20” Contis, not to mention that the car drove better – more responsive with straight line tracking like it was on rails. My wife loved the drive and I was pretty surprised at how much I liked the 21”.
The key difference between the 20” and 21”, for me, is about tire air cavity noise. If you don’t know, this is a sound that resonates at about 200 Hz and is excited by road roughness. Smooth road, no big deal. Rough road, drives me crazy. Perhaps this is what you are hearing with your Contis, which I feel are otherwise a fine tire.
When our 2024 came in I was hoping that even though we ordered 20” rims this car would come with foam lined tires, since it’s designed to operate on battery and since the foam lined tires were developed for EVs, in part to reduce cavity noise. And Continental makes a 20” foam lined tire. But no such luck, it came w/the same tires as the 2021.
The cavity noise, especially in electric mode, drove me crazy. I wound up replacing them at about 500 miles. I couldn’t find enough reviews of the foam lined Continentals (and I do like Continentals). I found a lot more reviews on the Michelin Primacy Tour AS, and bought them. This is a good tire and it does a much better job with cavity noise than the OEMs. It’s probably not as safe as the Contis on wet surfaces. There is a low/moderate amount of tread noise, but not objectionable. Overall, I like them.
Here’s something that I found interesting: We live both in AZ and MN. You would think that the AZ roads are better than MN roads. But from a cavity noise standpoint MN is far better. AZ asphalt roads used to be very smooth. But now they are top coating many of the asphalt roads with tar that has imbedded aggregate. When the road is topped with anything but the smallest aggregate it excites the cavity resonance in the worst way. MN does not do much of this. So, in spite of the fact that the foam lined Michelins do a good job w/cavity noise they don’t entirely kill it, and our car is actually quieter in MN than AZ, if you can believe it.
We very much like the ride/handling of our XC60s. We also had a 2020 XC90 with 20” (no air). I had never had 20” so I test drove 19” before we bought. I preferred the high speed stability of the 20” and that’s the way we went.
Hope this helps.