I can remember changing a few flats back in the day, but I can’t remember when the last one was. Certainly at least twenty years ago. But I only drive about 2500 miles a year, so maybe my data shouldn’t count.
Although, I did have a *low *tire maybe two years ago. I drove to a gas station and refilled it. The next day, it was even lower than before. Still, I didn’t change it. It had enough air in it to drive to the dealer and let them fix it (there was a screw in it). So I suppose the increase in reliability of tires is not just in avoiding flats (fault avoidance), but in maintaining drivability (fault tolerance).
I haven’t had a flat tire on my vehicle in more than 5 but less than 8 years.
Untill recently I was my family mechanic, 8 cars…32 tires:)
Lots of plugs, but most were slow leaks, so no swapping…just did 'em on the car.
Bottom line, maybe one tire change in the last 8 years, and that was run flat by a clueless family member who thought it was unfair for her to have to stop just because a tire was flat when she was in a hurry:smack:
Bias tires handle terribly too. Radials improved handling. Just a little side note.
One way to get a flat that can’t be fixed is to curb the car or otherwise damage the sidewall hitting a pothole. I hit a bad one in my new car and bent the wheel a little. I got a new tire as a precaution, and had the bent wheel moved to the rear, plus, I had the alignment checked (it was OK).
Going to get a new wheel, but I’m waiting until after I pay off a couple of other things.
I got not one, but two flat tires just a couple of days appart when flippers bought the house next door 3 or 4 years ago and apparently accidentally scattered screws on our road in the process of remodeling.
Michelin had a lock on the radial tire market for a while. But IIRC it didn’t really take that long for radials to take over; Consumer Reports did an article in the late '60s about why radials were superior, and by the mid-late '70s they had pretty much taken over.
reliability/longevity was inherent in the radial design.
yep. in the '70s, some manufacturers (though I think primarily GM) even put “RADIAL TUNED SUSPENSION” badges on cars which came with them from the factory. Plus the radial construction enabled the insanely low-profile performance tires we have today. You aren’t going to easily do this with bias-ply.
Year ago, quite literally in a few days it will be a year. I was being an idiot driving on balding tires (almost looked like racing slicks) that hadn’t been changed out in about 7 years (got the car from someone else, free, but lots of work was involved). I knew it could happen though, didn’t expect it to blow part of the fender and well off when it went (i posted about this before). Limped it 20 feet into a strip mall lot, put on the spare, called my mechanic friend, directed me to a small tire shop he knew. Had all four replaced within an hour of the incident (fender was a different story, pretty much fixed that later on in the same evening). Cost me about $160 for the four used tires + service, still driving that car with those tires on (since rotated of course) and still have plenty of tread left. Anyway, Lesson learned. Never drive on bald tires, especially not super old, sometimes it pays to not be a cheapass.
Never had a need, though there was an incident. In a parking lot, I noticed that the inner edge of my tire had shredded a bit and there were some steel wires poking out. It looked to be drivable, at least for a few low-speed miles to the tire store, but instead of risking a blowout (and having to buy what the store had in stock instead of a special order), I put on the spare (a full-size spare, mind you, with matching alloy rim).
I had a flat ten years ago. Had been driving alone for a couple thousand miles (over several days) when, on the road up to the pass, about 70 miles from home, I failed to see the beer-can-size rock in the “Watch for Falling Rocks” stretch (I always thought Falling Rocks was a lost Shoshone). Wrecked the wheel but good, so, when I got to the tire store, I bought two tires and wheels and used the old one for a spare (damn donut spares, anyway).
My favorite is all those places in hilly terrain where the narrow and twisty road winds along picking its way to the flats on the other side. There’s always a sign there commemorating the great 1800’s explorer and surveyor, Col Beauregard Deaunot, who first explored and mapped so much of this great land of ours. Sadly, the guy was a raging egomaniac and named everywhere he went after himself.
And yeah, this is one of those things that comes to mind every now and then. Thirty or forty years ago, flat tires were just one of those things that happened from time to time, usually on the order of between 6 months and 2 years in between flats. Now they’re a rarity.
Same with car mechanical issues. When’s the last time your car stopped working and stranded you by the side of the road? I remember a time in 2008, but nothing since then that I can recall.
Been longer than 8 years that I’ve had to change a flat.
But I’ve gotten several low pressure warnings, for which I first added air, and if it continued to lose pressure, I took it into the shop and they found a nail or screw in the tire and then repaired. This happens about once a year.
I guessed within the last four but it might have been eight. I do know that I had to put the spare on my wife’s car within that time period at least once.
My own car had a flat tire this winter but it was a frozen stem that was leaking rather than a puncture. I used the battery-powered compressor that came with the car and it worked a treat – filled it up and it has stayed round ever since.
Radial tires are somewhat more complex to manufacture and require very different tooling to produce. It has taken billions of dollars in engineering development effort to produce the modern high reliability radial tire, with some notable durability problems along the way, e.g. the Firestone 500 tread separation problem. Modern radial tires are very complex in the construction of the carcass and sidewall with both directional and rate dependent mechanical properties controlled to a very high degree of precision.
However, the greatest resistance wasn’t from tire manufacturers but automobile makers; the change from bias ply tires to radial ply tires also requires making changes to the suspension and steering owing to the very different camber thrust and pneumatic trail characteristics between the different constructions. While European car companies started designing cars and installing radial tires from the early 'Fifties onward, the first American made car to be equipped with radial tires from the factory was the 1970 Lincoln Continental Mark III, and radial tires only became popular in the US after the 1973 OPEC oil embargo where the higher efficiency of the radial tire became valued, notwithstanding the notable safety advantages of radial tires (not only substantially reduced propensity for blowout failures but also shorter braking distances, better controllability when cornering, and a larger and flatter tread patch for better traction).
Tire makers tried to compensate by producing bias ply tires with radial banding, which was only a marginal improvement over plain bias ply construction, but once radial tires became available they took over the automotive tire market and are now ubiquitous on automobiles. The radial ply construction tire is a marvel of cumulative engineering analysis and development, using advanced synthetic materials laid up in very precise configurations as determined by dynamic finite element analysis and complex testing. However, it is also at about the end of the line in terms of improvements; the synthetic butadiene rubbers that are used in tire manufacturers are about as durable as they can be while retaining sufficient grip, and while tire failures by causes other than puncture or sidewall tears are rare, the pneumatic tire is always subject to the potential for catastrophic rupture and loss of control, plus variable performance at different ambient temperatures owing to the expansion and contraction of the pressurant gas. Tread designs are always a compromise between durability, traction on wet pavement, and noise/vibration/handling (NVH) characteristics, and the need for compliance for pneumatic action dictates the mechanical characteristics of the tread and its carcass substrate.
In the next fifteen to twenty years I expect that non-pneumatic or hermetically sealed semi-pneumatic wheels with integrated tread will begin to replace pneumatic tires entirely for many automotive applications with improvements to safety, durability, and overall maintenance costs, eliminating the problem of punctures or “flat tires” entirely, and going from being a maintenance part that has to be replaced every 30k to 40k miles to a basic mechanical component of the suspension system that is refurbished or replaced with wear at 100k miles like struts and bearings.
I haven’t had to change a tire in…jeez, at least 20 years. I have had plenty of tires with slow leaks that lost pressure after a couple of days and needed to be fixed/replaced. Yeah, last time a giant screw was embedded in the tire. But the tire didn’t fail, and the only way I would have noticed is the newfangled tire pressure warning light came on. Obviously if I would have kept driving with the screw in the tire it probably would have eventually failed completely. But it didn’t.
Contrast to my memories growing up in the 70s when changing a tire by the side of the road was just one of those things everyone would have to do every so often. Tires used to be a consumable that you would use until it failed and then replace it.
Late 2012 I think. A leak developed when I was 400 miles from home. Having to stop to reinflate the tire every 10 or 20 miles wasn’t a good option. Neither I nor the shop I took it to could diagnose the problem so I drove home on the full-size spare. It took my local shop three tries to fix it. Thankfully they only charged me once. It turned out to be an issue with the seal between the wheel and the valve such that it lost pressure at speed but not while parked. The tire itself was undamaged.
