It’s a cliche that somebody thinking about buying a car would kick the tires.
I’ve never done it because I have no idea how it’s supposed to work. What results were you looking for when you kicked the tires?
Does tire kicking still work? Or was this just a myth and people never really kicked tires?
nm; ninja’d.
Although the modern sense of “tire kicking” implies that you’re basically automotive window shopping; that is looking at a car listed for sale without any intention of actually buying that particular car. So tire kicking in that sense is something you do when you don’t really care about the condition of a particular car but want to pretend you do.
Because your dad did it.
Earlier generations checked the teeth of the horse they just bought.
Nitpick: I think you’ll find they checked the teeth before they bought the horse.
Coincidentally the subject came up during a conversation with my father a few days ago.
I told him that nowadays we’d check a car’s wifi connection.
Well, that’s it. Just lock all of the forums and put an announcement at the top of each of them telling people to just search the board for their questions.
Or, we could be appreciative of members who go to the trouble of linking us to other people’s responses and making us aware of information we did not previously know about.
Do people why die still “kick buckets”?
Well, you can judge the quality of rubber of the tires this way. A good thump is a quality tire, while a weak dud sound is bad rubber.
It’s a metaphor. I doubt anyone, at any point, actually physically kicked the tires of a car in order to determine their quality (or the quality of a car itself). Any other explanation is just a retconn.
Even the ones listed above don’t talk about actually kicking a tire in a used/new car lot. It’s like “the whole nine yards” in that there isn’t any correspondence to a particular real-world reality.
Say what now?
Moderator Note
We actually do ask people to do that. From the General Questions Rules and FAQs:
While we don’t want to discourage people from asking questions, it’s certainly good practice to link to previous discussions if you are aware of them.
Please refrain from junior-moderating. This goes double for when you are contradicting what is actually considered good practice in GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Not if it was a gift horse!
It’s genetic. When my grandson was 1 (it was within a week of his first birthday, his parents took him the Montreal Christmas craft fare that included a car raffle. He had just begun to walk and he toddled over to the raffle car and…kicked the tire! We decided at that point that is in the genes (as good an explanation as any other).
On a road trip a year or two back, we stopped at a truck stop to fill our tank and to drain our bladders. Waiting for the gang to finish, I walked through the shopping aisles and saw an interesting device that looked like a baby baseball bat. The label said it was a Tire Thumper, and IfU (Instructions for Use) said you use your ear and the sound and feel of the rebound to tell if your tires were properly inflated.
As the OP, I’d like to thank Johnny L.A. for his work.
