Some people are clueless about their cars. I’m assuming the lug nuts were loose and as they loosened for miles the car would have handled like **it. And made a lot of noise. But they keep going until the wheel comes off? Stupid.
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Told my friend that I would take one lug nut from each wheel and use them to reattach the departed wheel, if the bolt’s threads were still good enough to tighten.
(Years ago a handicapped friend called and said he had a flat.
I discovered that one of the lug nuts was a different size. His lug wrench would not fit it.
Luckily, I had a + lug nut wrench.)
Being mechanically minded my whole life I notice things. Like a junker car missing a lug nut. I’ve seen a car with a missing nut on the front and rear wheel. So of course I walked to the other side. One of the wheels was missing a nut! I guess some people want to die!
At every railroad crossing there are signs with emergency contact numbers, I wonder if anyone of these folks even knew that and if they did know, did they bother to call that number?
Probably not, since the end of the video shows the crossing gates coming down…
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One missing lug nut on each wheel is not a big deal, Nascar had to institute a rule that their cars had to have all 5 lug nut and they had be tight because the crews were only putting 3 lug nuts on each wheel to save time on pit stops, They were going 200 mp.h.
Some of you folks are so concerned about tire pressure but when is the last time you checked the lug nuts? Yeah me neither. In 60 years only had one car they were loose on but does happen. Still don’t know if it was bad wheel, vandals, or what. I’m not a mechanic, engineer, or clueless about cars and don’t race or abuse mine. Just sayin’ is all, can happen to the best of us.
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+1
Many years ago, I was in the process of rotating the tires on my father’s '66 Galaxie 500 when I was interrupted by a phone call. I was positive that I had fully tightened all of the lug nuts just prior to the phone call, but after driving a few blocks, I realized that at least one of the wheels hadn’t been fully-tightened.
It was only one wheel whose lug nuts I had neglected to fully tighten, but the result could have been… not so good… if I hadn’t turned around and gone back home to check my work.
Heh heh. Rules for thee but not for me. I left the band saw running and went in for a fresh cup of coffee. Forgot it was still running. Six months later i showed the doc what a good job he had done on my finger. As careful as we all are, stuff happens. I told him I thought I might have some frog dna due to the regeneration.
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Sadly, most wheel offs come after a vehicle has been serviced and the wheels removed and the lug nuts were not properly torqued… We, as a company, went to double sign offs and double torquing wheels, meaning that tech A torqued to spec and handed off or left it hanging on one lug nut, the torque wrench to tech B to double check the lug torque and tighten if required, then both would initial the work order, this cut wayyyy down on company wide wheel offs to almost none… If a vehicle was in need of brakes and the customer declined repair, we documented it so if the customers wheel fell off down the road we could check to see if the brakes had been replaced, same with most things that required the wheel to be removed, that eliminated us getting the blame for a wheel off caused by the customer or another shop…
One of the jobs of a service manager was to check every morning
that every work order was signed off in and the initials didn’t look fake… If something was questionable, then we could call the customer and go out and double check and or ask them to go to any shop to have them checked and send us the bill…
Lug nuts if torqued to spec just don’t come loose as a rule of thumb with stock wheels, the wheel stud either snaps due to over torquing or simply leaving loose, either way it can happen pretty fast and most of the time it kills the threads from the wheel moving back and forth with the weight of the vehicle on them if not caught really quickly…
We basically all but stopped doing any custom wheels without proper centric rings…
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Ya, I remember hearing techs yelling at each other all day “Double check oil and all four!!”.
When I ran my own shop we had a wheel-off incident and one of my guys who used to work at Firestone asked if we were going to adopt that policy. I replied that if you felt comfortable with that you could certainly ask another tech to double check but I wasn’t going to make it mandatory. I firmly believe each tech should be responsible for their own mistakes.
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Standing out of the way, I watch and listen to the torque wrench clicks.
Just after a tire rotation a hospital called for an emergentransport.
Glad not being concerned abouthe tires though I listen andisplay the tire pressures.
The point of the double check is to ensure those problems don’t happen.
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I agree, but in a court of law, the mechanic is not the only one named in a wrongful death lawsuit, the company is also named, especially when it is a big company with deep pockets…
So when you have double checks and sign offs put in place and followed, it is a CYA in court that is proven to work…
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+1
But, even if the company in question doesn’t have deep pockets, the legal principle of Respondeat Superior is almost always invoked.
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Some years back I got new tires for my car at NTB. As I was driving around the building I could tell something was off. I immediately stopped and found one wheel had just one loose lug nut. No real harm done, but I was just about to drive away at 50mph. I’ve never returned to NTB.
Back then, NTB was probably still owned by Sears. Nowadays, they are owned by Mavis, which is one of the lowest-rated tire retailers in The US, so it’s not likely that they have improved since your negative experience.
All our NTB stores are now Mavis.
Of course it is. But I wasn’t about to make all that process mandatory for what was an isolated incident. What’s next? Having another tech double check coolant level? Battery cables? Cylinder head torque? Firestone decided it was in their best interest to implement that program. I decided it wasn’t.
Of course a shop will do what it reasonably can to avoid errors, but I believe a shop should also have a plan to deal with these errors when they inevitably happen. I don’t care what you do for a living, at some point in your career, in the course of doing your job, you have made a mistake that affects your customer. And we deal with these things on the rare occasion when they happen.
If it’s not a rare occasion, then it’s time to address the underlying issue.
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Somebody has a bad day, and everybody is punished for it and productivity falls.