My wife observed the other day that men over here (Germany), when regarding a car, sometimes kick the tires as if to check whether they have the right pressure. And added that no woman would do that, because it is absurd (that is the condensed version. She is right in so far as this is no way to gauge the pressure of a tire). I agree in as much as I never have seen a woman do it, but I know men do it and have done it myself on occasion. So I wondered whether this was a Universal Axiom, valid across the pond, or not. Thus, two polls: one for men, one for women. I will answer twice to get this polling going, one yes for men and one no for women in the name of my wife, as I know her opinion. Fell free to answer once or twice as you please, and add any comment you like:
Men do it over here, but I don’t think they do it to check the pressure. They do it because it’s gotten to be something that people think that one is expected to do, when checking a car. Nobody actually knows what it’s for, but they don’t want to give the appearance of not knowing, so they do it.
I saw a comic strip when I was a kid, no idea where. A man and a woman talking to a car salesman and (I guess) an apprentice car salesman. The man in the couple kicks the tires.
The woman to the man, sotto voce: “Why did you do that?”
The man: “It’s what you do to show you know your stuff as a customer. It tells the salesman you’re not gonna sit there and be fleeced.”
The apprentice to the salesman, aside: “Why did he do that?”
The salesman: “He’s trying to show me he’s a pro at buying cars. What he actually showed me is that he isn’t anything of the sort. Now, watch me fleece him.”
Shorter than that most likely. It was a long time ago! But it was that general idea.
Long long ago, when the earth was young and pneumatic tires were new and exciting technology you could gauge the condition of tires with a kick. They started with tubes in the tire and if you were going to buy a vehicle you’d kick the tires to see if they were loose in the wheel or coming apart, to check if the tube was under or over inflated, etc. Remember, this started when horsepower was provided by horses and tread condition wasn’t the major factor.
Now here in the 21st century when everybody has jetpacks the only reason I sometimes kick a tire just to prove immaterialism is an disproven philosophy. Yet I am still not convinced.
I’m a male German and I have done it. I’m not as much a car person as some of my friends, but the car buffs among them do it too. IMHO it makes sense: if the pressure is low, the tires give lower resistance to the kicks and you feel it in your feet/toes. It’s not an exact science, but gives you a hint.
ETA: I don’t really know or remember about women doing it, respectively, but I’m quite sure that my ex who is kind of a car (and motorbike) person does it.
Or any product. It just means to perform some cursory step to demonstrate that a thing isn’t completely fraudulent. I’m surprised to learn that anyone ever actually did it.
Hah, I just remembered an old story in which I almost got in trouble for this behavior. My first car was a Volkswagen Golf 1 which I bought when it was 11 years old and which sometimes was a little wobbly (mind you, it was a good car, I drove it for another six years). Anyway, shortly before I got home with that car once late at night, I had felt a little disturbance on the steering wheel while driving. Probably I had only hit a stone or something, but after I had parked the car, I performed the kicking the tires ritual to make sure that they were ok. Just at that moment a police car stopped by, an officer approached me and asked “Is this your car? What are you doing there?”. I explained the situation and showed him my licence and ID, so he said thanks and goodbye, but I was a little nervous for a minute. They probably thought I was a drunken vandal.
In the piloting biz, “kicking the tires” is slang for doing the airplane exterior preflight. Given that proper tire inflation is about 180psi (varies by airplane) and even 10psi less is a problem, and the sidewalls have a dozen plies, you’re not gonna learn anything useful with a puny human kick. But we still call it that. And sometimes even really kick one. It feels good and right somehow.
I shouldn’t have said “fraudulent,” since the metaphor extends beyond just that. We occasionally use it in software for checking a thing out for basic functionality, like a prerelease game that no one is sure will actually work. Someone kicks the tires before distributing it more widely, just so that only one person has to waste their time instead of dozens. It’s not the first idiom we’ve repurposed; for instance, we use “triage” a lot for a similar kind of cursory look at something (but in that case, to classify into broad priority categories).
Even if you could reliably measure the pressure that way, what would be the point? Tire pressure would be the easiest thing in the world for the sales lot to “fix” on the car to make it look better, and even if it were low, it’d be likewise easy to fix it yourself after buying.
I love you @Pardel-Lux but the spelling error in the title is making me all sorts of twitchy. Would it be okay to ask a mod to fix it? Not the spelling of tyres of course, the “pleople” thing.
Okay, that’s out of the way. Woo. Was bugging me every time the thread updated.
I voted in the group saying as a male, I never kick the tires. I mean, I’m terrible at doing car work myself, so before a normal trip I get professionals to do it for me. I’m lucky I can use a digital pressure gauge to check if they look out of spec, which means a lot more to me than kicking a tire.
But I was at least aware of the urban myth of why people did it. Just never seemed anyone I knew could actually tell any difference that a visual inspect wouldn’t catch (visually sagging).
I just recalled something probably relevant to the origin of the practice.
Truckers legitimately use a tire iron, crowbar, or similar to whack the tires on their tractor and trailer. With a set of dual tires, one being very low on air won’t look bad because the weight will be held up by its axle mate. But a good whack with an iron will give a nice rebound for a properly full tire and a dull mushy thump for a flat-ish one.
On a conventional car with one tire per axle, and especially in the old days of bias-ply tires, material underinflation is real obvious by eyeball. Whacking it won’t tell you anything you can’t already see.
Thanks to the mods for correcting the title!
So after 59 votes so far 13 out of 48 men (just over one quarter) and no woman out of eleven kick tires. At least in the “no women do this” part it looks like my wife was right.