I really shouldn’t say personal experience with the tire blowout thing, because I haven’t had that happen, like in this video. The sidewall starts leaking on an old tire and it goes flat normally.
I wonder what made this car crash? Aside from driving very fast, they must have hit the brakes or steered hard after the rear tire blew out causing them to lose control. I don’t see how one failed tire could on a mostly straight section of road could cause this. In some other videos front tires blew out, and the drivers could have done better by having a more firm grip of the steering wheel.
So you are basing this on nothing at all except your “common sense”… Riiiight!
A blowout on even a limited speed corner or ramp with an outside tire will result in extreme understeer (front end off the road) or oversteer (rear end off the road). Rollovers can happen to both cars and SUVs because the soft ground along the road will trip the vehicle over.
This comes from my 27 years as an automotive engineer specializing in vehicle dynamics, shock absorbers and suspension design as well as 18 years as an amateur race car driver and over 30 years of track day driving experience. I have personal experiences with blowouts both by accident and on purpose for testing.
And yes tire companies want to sell tires… Edmunds sells used cars… what is their motivation for agreeing with 10 years? Or a car magazine like Car and Driver? Or our resident retired tire engineer, CapriRacer? While you may not value your life, we do, as well as those that are on the road near you.
Obviously if you drive slowly enough nothing bad will happen. The question is how slow that has to be. Having a lot of experience racing and learning how to handle things at high speeds doesn’t really help with every day driving safety. There is no way to be completely safe while driving fast. The only sure way to be safe is to slow down.
The thing is it appears that most of these blow outs are actually on newer tires that are defective or improperly inflated. If a tire is defective how does buying new tires solve this? The new one could be defective too. Should people inspect their tires for cracking or other defects, put older tires in the front, drive at slower and safer speeds, and learn how to steer and brake properly? Or should they just buy new tires after so many years?
I would assume they collaborated together on a way to make money by lowering the quality of rubber in tires, then agreed upon an expected life. Why is my 30 year old tire just fine and a 9 year old one starting to crack and look old? Which one should be replaced?
Your 30 year old tire is NOT fine nor is a 9 year old tire with dry rot. Both should be replaced. Visual inspection is not enough…but we’ve had this discussion with another poster. That poster had a 30 year old tire fail… not sure even that was convincing.
The belting is contained by the rubber. And the belting degrades also since in many cases it is Nylon, Aramid or other polymers. None of the belting can be inspected visually.
Tires are the most important safety item on the car. More than seatbelts, airbags, side impact bars or collapsing steering columns.
Actually steering wheels and brake pedals are the most important safety items on a car, because if the steering wheel and / or break pedal falls off you’ll probably crash and die. So is power braking and power steering, because we have a generation of drivers who won’t know what to do and will basically stop trying to drive if those items fail.
If a front tire blows out, it can cause the steering wheel to jerk to one side and cause a crash. But if the driver has a firm grip on the wheel like they should, it’s not much of an issue.
Most tire failures are road hazards. There’s a lot of energy available with compressed gases, and suddenly releasing that gas can not only cause damage to the tire and the surrounding “Stuff”, like fenders, but the damaged tire can contact the fenders and/or suspension pieces and damage those as well - PLUS - the explosive air can actually push the vehicle around.
But there is another kind of tire failure where the tire itself fails structurally. The most common is a belt-leaving-belt separation, commonly called a “Tread Separation”. The tire may or may not lose inflation pressure.
In this case the failure is usually in the rubber to steel adhesion under the top belt near the edge of the belt. It starts off small and grows until the entire width of the belt has detached. At that point, centrifugal forces cause the tread and top belt to bulge out and either that bulge contacts the fender or there is enough force to cause the tread and top belt to create a “flap”. That flap can cause a lot of damage as the tire rotates. There are a lot of variations as to what happens next, including the loss of pressure and sometimes loss of control of the vehicle.
The strong bias toward buying new things has caused the fact that new tires can also be defective and blow out to be ignored. Look it up the problem is more to do with under inflation. It must weaken the reinforcement belting in the tire and increase the chances of sudden failure.
In 2007 I needed a spare tire for a new Chrysler 300, my parts department could not find a local tire dealer that could order a compact spare tire. I see that Tire Rack now sells compact spare tires but that was not available 15 years ago.
There are several people on this thread with 2010-2011 vehicles, how old is your spare tire? Where did you buy the replacement?
I’m glad I read this tread today….Thanks guys….I crawled under my 15 year old vehicle and looked at the space saver tire. Small cracks all over the side wall……A NEW ONE IS ON ORDER NOW.
If the spare had gone flat in storage, the poor condition of the rubber wouldn’t be noticed until you inflated it and drove a little bit and the cracks started showing up. I thought I got a good deal on a used tire but I believe this was the situation. It was a spare that had been stored deflated for years.
Lots of older car places seem to not be aware of the short life span of modern tires. Rubber used to just get hard with age. Now it gets weak and hard. I wonder what would happen if someone put winter green inside an old hard tire? Winter green is a good rubber softener. It takes a few days to soak in to the rubber. It also works its way back out of the rubber and the rubber gets hard again. But if it was inside the tire maybe it would last longer?
The point is these sudden tire blowouts aren’t all that much due to age. Old tires get sidewall cracks and go flat. Under inflation and defects in new tires cause blowouts too. So if people were sharing good and truthful information, and not representing the tire industry, they would be putting more emphasis on proper inflation of tires and inspecting tires for defects, and less emphasis on how old they are.
