I usually go by tire ratings by Consumer Reports. Based on this I recently got Nexen Winguard Sport 2 for winter. Rated as good or better than Michelin X Ice, and less $$. They are Korean.
It's hard to know what are mainstream, and it probably doesn't matter. For example, Uniroyal sounds mainstream, but they are usually near the bottom of the ratings.
Consumer Reports also wrote:
Our testing program showed no clear trend between track performance and country of origin. We did see that U.S.–sourced tires were far more common among the SUV and truck tire group we just finished testing, where 33 percent were born in the U.S.A. For contrast, just 19 percent of last year’s ultra-high-performance tires were made in American.
Simply put: The test results show that national bragging rights have no traction. Savvy consumers are best served choosing replacement tires based on our ratings, factoring in the predicted tread life and cost, rather than judge by a tire’s country of origin
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