A flat tire is one reason we have AAA membership. If my car is in our garage with a flat, I’ll use my floor-jack and tools to change it myself. If I’m out and about, I call AAA.
That’s maybe part of it, along with manufacturers experiences that it’s an area where they can shave a couple bucks off a couple million cars without generating too many complaints. As well as…
I get the feeling that in the last couple decades preparations for a puncture have become almost vestigial, in that they really don’t happen so much anymore. Modern tires are pretty damn good and punctures are a pretty rare and unusual event. So spare tires have migrated to ever more out of the way and inaccessible parts of the vehicle, shrunk, and the accompanying tools have withered into an almost token gesture.
To be fair to the manufacturers I haven’t experienced a puncture in many many years, but I’m a bit obsessive since we live in in a fairly rural area where roadside assistance could take a while.
About ten years ago I got a flat tire on the highway. Wife wanted to let AAA handle it, but they were going to take 25 minutes just to show up, plus however long it would have taken them to actually change the tire (or tow me to a shop). I changed it myself in about ten minutes and we went on our way.
I’ve called AAA three times in the past twenty years. Once for a vehicle that just died. They arrived promptly and took the car and me to my mechanic. Once for a flat tire in below-zero weather and I didn’t have a coat. The AAA guy arrived in ten minutes and changed the tire (I tipped $20). Once for a dead battery. He was going to jump start me but I bought a battery instead, as my battery was >6 years old.
I’ve never waited over ten minutes.
My gf called AAA once when she locked her only set of keys in her farm truck. He arrived promptly, popped open the door and was gone, all in a few minutes.
Ever changed a tire on a German car? lug bolts.
If it really was decades ago, and his car was old at that time, I’m going to guess that he had a vacuum-driven wiper motor, not an electric one. I had one of those on my '61 Ford. The vacuum tubes get old, and either crack, or collapse, and then air doesn’t pass through them, and the motor doesn’t operate. It’s far, far more likely for the tubes to go bad than for the motor to.
I’ve never owned a German car, though I got close to buying a Boxster once. How are lug bolts superior? It seems like it’s harder to align the wheel when remounting it. One common reason to change a stud is that a cross-threaded lug nut damaged the threads on the nut and the stud (probably the second most common after too frequent over-tightening of the lug nuts fatigues the stud, which just snaps off when you are removing the nut). If you cross-thread a lug bolt, you’ll damage the thread in the hub, which is way more expensive to replace than a common stud. I don’t see how lug bolts are better.
I have a German car. Although it is true aligning the wheel may be slightly harder (there is a little rod in the kit that screws into the hub to give an alignment reference if you want), if a lug bolt snaps off due to overtorquing and isn’t cross threaded it is easier to drill out or unthread the remaining bolt from the wheel flange than replace a stud. IMO, though, the differences between working with bolts and studs are largely equivocal.
I drove a 66 Bronco in high school. Engine vacuum decreases as you open the throttle, so when the snow was too heavy I would have to get off the gas to get the wipers going. The Bronco was way underpowered to begin with, so getting off the gas every 10 seconds or so slowed me considerably. I guess it was an unintended safety feature - you couldn’t speed when it was snowing if you wanted to see where you were going. But the heater was as underpowered as the engine, so going slow just prolonged the freezing agony. And heaven help you if you needed to jump out and crawl underneath to fix the column shift linkage. Always had some baling wire handy driving old Fords.
Cars were much more fun back then. And you could turn on each wiper individually.
After repeated tire changes the threads can get worn. When the threads on a nut get worn you can toss it and put on a new one. If you’re screwing a bolt in over and over again and the internal threads get worn you have a lot of not very good options. You can drill it out and retap for a an oversize bolt, you can drill it out and press in a plug which you then weld in and drill and tap for the appropriate bolt, or you can helicoil the damn thing. The right thing to do is to drill it out and press in a plug, but that’s a huge nuisance.
My '41 Plymouth had vacuum wipers. I always said that anyone who tried to drive uphill in the rain was just asking for trouble anyway. 
I installed a ceiling fan a while back. After fighting with it in every imaginable way to get it installed, and getting pretty riled in the process, it was all up and looking good. But it didn’t work.
I called a handyman in to go behind me and check the wiring, figuring that was the most likely thing to have gotten wrong.
And it was, in a manner of speaking. I had, it turns out, actually run the right wires to the right places and done pretty much everything correctly except in my let’s-get-this-maddening-project-over-with I had tightened one of the wire nuts so badly, it had actually severed the wire inside, thus causing the connection to fail.
Bad news: Not for the first time, getting angry at an inanimate object cost me money.
Good news: It was a quick fix.
Better news: Left unattended to, it could theoretically have caused a fire.
Also, we now have a running joke in our house whenever This Old House or a similar show has someone using wire nuts. “You know, you have to be careful with those things.”
Had a 79 Ford Granada - this was around 2002 or so - trying to change a tire I split two different 3/4
sockets applying all the muscle I had trying to change that tire in a parking lot. We limped over to a gas station that still had a lift/functioning service bay and asked the guy to help - he sat on it with an impact wrench for 10 minutes and the lug nuts wouldn’t move.
In a bit of frustration, he stood up and kicked the tire - the tire - a-frame and all - fell to teh ground. (the top of the a-frame had rusted thru apparently, and the kick was all it took to finish it)
The look of shock on his face was priceless - we removed what little belongings were left in the car and pushed it into an empty spot and called the junk yard. As far as I know that tire is still attached ot whats left of that hub.
That was a great car - until it wasn’t.
– that should have been 1/2" drive sockets above - -
RTFM
It will state the correct torque to apply to the bolts, in you favorite measure
Foot-pounds, Newton-meters, or whatever.
What toilet instruction manual includes torque specifications?
How often do you remove your tires that your lug nuts are wearing out, and why wouldn’t the wheel studs wear out with them?
No, it won’t. These aren’t connecting rods or cylinder heads, they’re toilets. Here’s an American Standard PDF manual for toilet installation, and in step 4, the spec is “Hand tighten only. Do not overtighten.”
Here’s another PDF manual for Toto. See step 2:
The general idea when bolting down porcelain is pretty clear: snug up the nuts/bolts to remove slop, but no more than that. But I don’t recall ever seeing a torque spec on this sort of thing.
I swap out snow tires and summer tires every winter/summer, so the nuts and studs are getting loosened/tightened twice a year on my cars. I haven’t had a problem with wear, but on my previous car something weird happened after several years of ownership. I found that after swapping tires, if I tightened the lug nuts to the torque spec in the manual, they would work loose after a week or so. I had to tighten them well past the torque spec to get them to stay tight for the long haul. The problem was solved when I bought new lug nuts after a few years of putting up with this. My suspicion is that a shop that had installed new tires on my rims had grossly overtorqued the lug nuts when putting the rims back on the car, forever compromising those nuts. Since new nuts solved the problem, it would seem that the studs themselves were OK. I don’t know why this would have been the case, other than maybe the studs were deliberately designed to be stronger than the nuts so that tightening to yield/failure doesn’t require an expensive stud replacement job.
Between tire rotation and snow tires maybe four times a year back in the day, throw in a flat tire once in a while and the occasional inspection a couple more, but they add up. I don’t worry about studs wearing out, that’s an easy fix. It’s when those internal threads get buggered that you are well and truly fucked.
I honestly do not believe any car company is worrying about wear on the threads of lug nuts/lugs bolts or the studs/rotors. I had always believed that the use of bolts was because of metal fatigue. If the nuts/bolts are not tight, the stud/bolt will suffer fatigue damage. A bolt is much easier to replace than a stud. The problem with this theory is the the German design philosophy, to me anyway, has always seemed to be against “idiot proofing” and more towards “use correct procedures and maintain it properly, and you won’t have a problem.” If the bolt/stud is designed properly and tightened properly, it will not see fatigue, and studs are much easier for routine maintenance (eg, changing tires. Replacing studs/repairing threads in rotors, while perhaps not totally uncommon, is not routine.)
Theory #2 is that the German engineers do it that way just to be dicks.
Finally, the best way to fix stripped internal threads, in general, is a helicoil. As has been proven many times over, helicoil threads are stronger than the original threads and do not require the use of oversized screws, which can affect the original design.
I did RTFM. In regards to the bolt installation it said “Do Not Overtighten.” That’s it. That’s why I’m here asking this question.