> thus it's always the brake pads stopping the car, not the tires?
The tires are the only thing in contact with the ground. All deceleration force can only come from the grip between tires and the ground[1]. The brake pads in most installations can easily lock up the tires (which means now you only have sliding coefficient of friction instead of rolling friction). In other words, what matters is tire grip.
Buy the grippiest tires you can afford to run.
[1] Well, cars with aero downforce also get a lot of deceleration from that. A Formula 1 car will decelerate at more than 1G merely by lifting off the throttle, without touching the brakes. But none of this is relevant to street cars.
Even race cars running on slicks and weighing 700 kg get better braking by avoiding lockups and using the pads instead. So unless your pads are trash, you better get a proper ABS instead of imagining some magical tire with grip comparable to brake pads.
The above comment seems to be making a distinction that braking force comes from the tires or the brakes. That is not how it works.
The brakes provide friction to resist the spinning of the wheel, but of course only to the point that the tire can provide grip (friction) against the road surface.
Picture trying to brake with slick tires on wet ice. Nearly zero tire grip equals nearly zero braking force. Doesn't matter what kind of brake components are on the car. No grip = no grip.
If you want to be able to stop quickly to avoid accidents you need to maximize grip a the tire-road contact patch and you need to have a braking system powerful enough to fully take advantage of that grip.
Every car sold for decades now already has the latter (unless something is broken, obviously), so the variable you need to control is tire grip.
Thus: Buy the grippiest tires you can afford to run (if you want optimal braking to avoid accidents, that is).
> The brake pads in most installations can easily lock up the tires
> In the United States, the NHTSA has mandated ABS in conjunction with Electronic Stability Control under the provisions of FMVSS 126 as of September 1, 2012.
