alright, so update 2:
first, whats up everybody, haven't been on the site in a while...
so, my experience with these tires has not been good! after going to and from various shops and dealers, spending plenty of money (those dealerships and their diagnostic fees!!!) to figure out what the vibration was; turns out (after 3 road force balances) these tire were nearly defective!
first went to a Ford dealership (had some other things that needed fixing too), $800 later they say they can't do anything about the vibration because the tires are too far out of balanced. they said they checked the entire front end, the tie rods were good, brakes checked out, CV joints are fine etc; and recommended i go back to Walmart (where i got them initially installed) and put in a warranty claim for the ones that are defective. they only tried to road force balance two of them and found one to be 46 pounds out of balance and the other at 24 pounds out, too much to try and correct.
so i wouldn't have been so mad at the dealer, if:
1) one of the other issues (a blown fuse that stopped the driver's seat and steering wheel from moving, which they charged almost $200 to change!!!! because they claim they have to do a complete electrical workup to make sure its nothing more complicated) completely failed two days later! i ended up going to O'reilly's, brought a $5 fuse and they changed it for me! so far its holding up, so i'm not going to go back to the dealer unless it blows again and then demand they fix it at no charge besides parts that might be necessary.
2) they charged me $80 for just attempting to balance two of the tires w/o completing the job. the place that eventually ended up balancing the tires correctly (within spec after 2 attempts) only charged $40 all together!
3) . the ridiculousness of diagnostic fees! out of the $800 i spent, almost half were diagnostic fees, and the dealer claim they dropped half of the fees they were going to charge me out of courtesy!!! ridiculous AF!
so after the Ford dealer i ended up going to 3 more places; the Walmart that installed the tires (they claimed the tires came up ok on their balancer, they didn't have a road force balancer). the service manager, who was at least polite and attentive (took the car on a test drive after they tried to balance the tires), said that perhaps because i got size 255 vs 245 it was causing issues. so no luck there. i tried a small local place, really nice guys who looked the car up and down (for free, wouldn't accept any money from me at all!) and couldn't find a problem with the car (tie rods etc) but said he did feel a vibration on the highway.
so finally after back and forths with a Cooper rep, i ended up at a local Discount Tire who was a cooper dealer and had a road force balancer, thinking i would have to do a warranty claim. they tried to road force balance the tires, came up with out of whack numbers just like the Ford dealer, but they thought 20 or so pounds over was acceptable. after more discussion with Cooper i ended up taking the car back to Discount Tire to complete the warranty claim. the tech there said he was going to give it one more shot as a courtesy, since they had not written all the values down for the tires the first time (because they felt in the 20s was OK). IDK what they did, but they got them to balance out, finally. I was skeptical, yet when i took the car out to test drive it on the highway, the vibration was gone or pretty much completely gone, i'm so sensitive to anything now i feel the tiniest thing. but really, the car is driving well within standard atm.
So after all that, its safe to say I'm not the biggest fan of these tires.
they still feel extra heavy, like theres more unsprung weight at each corner. and now that the tread is down to 7/32s after only 8 months of driving (these tires are supposed to have a 60,000 mile tread life) the crazy grip they had initially is pretty much gone. just feels like a heavy (and sturdy) tire.
not exactly what i was looking for...