speaking of Firestone tires, they’re among the noisiest I’ve ever encountered
I have a set of Bridgestones on one of our cars right now . . . the car’s fine mechanically, but the paint is shot and it’s old and not worth much, so therefore I couldn’t justify a better set of tires
I got Bridgestones for my daily. Got 'em 'cause I figured the deal was too good to pass up… Next time I’ll pass it up and go back to Michelins. They aren’t bad but they aren’t as good as the Pilot Sport A/S+ tires I had on it previously.
Most Lexus vehicles come with Michelin or Bridgestone tires with the exception of the NX200t mentioned in the original post, half of those come with Yokohama Geolander tires. Michelin or Bridgestone should be good enough for the Mercedes guy that shopped at Costco.
We stock Firestone Firehawk tires in a few sizes for the customers on a budget with older cars, they cost much less than Bridgestone tires.
I think everyone has differing opinions and experience on tires.
The Bridgestone RE tires were really bad–noisy, didn’t wear well, and were kind of rough riding. But then the Serenity line are fantastic tires and I don’t recall any complaints about the Ecopia line either.
Firestone makes some low end tires, but the Affinity I put on my wife’s car were a great replacement for the Goodyear Comfortred, which I loved. For any SUV I drive, if/when I need tires I’ll use the Destination LE series and nothing else.
Personally, my experience with Michelin tires has been OK to poor. I bought a Ford Explorer with Michelin Latitude from Costco, traction and handling was OK but treadlife was only a little over 40K. Michelin passenger car tires that I’ve driven on were poor in every way. We bought a luxury SUV almost a year ago that came with Michelins. The car has 13,000 now, and I doubt we’ll get more than 30K out of them. Which is ok, they’re noisy.
we’ve got Bridgestone ecopias on one of our cars right now . . . they’re perfectly fine, but I wouldn’t call them exceptional
My experience with Michelin has also been mixed
good experience with symmetry, harmony and premier for personal vehicles . . . cars, to be exact. I easily got over 80K out of my symmetry tires, and that particular car never even got a steering alignment. The only reason I didn’t get more mileage is because the tires were starting to dry-rot.
At work, we’ve had various Michelin truck tires, mostly Defenders. And they’re just awful. Completely overrated. BF Goodrich truck tires are MUCH better, in my opinion. Occasionally, we’ve stocked cooper truck tires. no problem there, either
Interestingly, it seems that our trucks with i-beam front ends seem to be kinder on tires, versus ifs trucks, or even those with twin i-beam. The fords with the hollow front axle and ball joints . . . think F-450 . . . are also pretty forgiving on tires.
again, these are just my experiences, and they may be at odds with somebody else’s experiences . . .
Interesting how we started off talking about premium vs regular, and now we’ve moved onto tires 
It’s like cars. You’ve gotta look at the specific tire, not just the brand. A Chevy Cavalier was a crappy car, but the Chevy Nova was great ('cause it was made by Toyota!).
You also need to look at the application. I wouldn’t put Michelins on my fun-car. It gets Yokohama S.drives because I want high performance and I don’t care about tread wear on a car that gets driven maybe 1500 miles a year if the weather is really stellar that summer. Those same tires would be a really stupid choice for my daily even if I had a different car for winter, because I’d end up replacing them constantly.