Can’t you just buy yourself a wheel and tire and throw that in the trunk?
I have roadside assistance, but I can’t imagine not having a spare. I have no preference for donut vs full spare (donut is fine with me, and what I have, and it takes up less space), but I don’t want to be stuck, waiting around when I need to get somewhere. I just blew a freaking rim a couple weeks ago on a pothole while picking a friend up from the airport. Took me ten minutes, maybe, to replace the tire. Called the tire shop, ordered a new rim, and was able to go on my day normally, without having to wait godknowshowlong for the roadside assistance to show up and end up towing me I suppose. Not much you can do with a tire when the rim is horribly bent and actually cracked through.
So, yeah, I’ll take the spares. In the past five years, I’ve had three tires go flat on me, and then another three or four on my wife’s car. One time we called roadside and it took over an hour for them to get there and it made me late for a meeting. I can’t imagine driving a car without a spare.
My time is valuable. When I got a flat in 2009, my wife wanted to call AAA and let them handle it. I didn’t want to wait, so I changed it myself in about 10 minutes’ time and we got on with our day.
Apparently not. Example, the 2014 Infiniti Q50 doesn’t include a spare tire with the basic vehicle, but it’s available as an option.
Manufacturers’ decisions about including/omitting a spare tire appear to be entirely market-driven. If the lack of a spare tire is a dealbreaker for you, then you’ll just need to add it to your must-have spec list when you go shopping for a car; make it one of the first questions you ask a sales dude.
As others said, so buy a car that DOES come with a spare. Or sacrifice the trunk space and buy your own aftermarket extra tire and wheel, nobody forbids that. You would however need to also install and set up your own pressure sensor or else accept that you’d have compromised VSA/ABS while driving on it.
But back to the OP point: Car salesmen will stretch the truth about how something’s “government required”. AFAIK there’s no direct government dictate to eliminate the spare tires. There is the very indirect influence in that now the carmaker figures that to raise the fuel economy numbers they can always lose the weight of the spare, especially when new tires are so reliable and there are runflats.
That last bit means they also get to do a solid by their friends the tire makers, by making you have to forever get more expensive OEM-replacement runflats.
Who knows, maybe there is some item deep in the DOT Regs that says that by X years tires will have to have Y level of runflat capability but why would it mean a mandate to eliminate spares or a ban on adding a fifth wheel/tire at original sale?
Anecdotal: in beween cars with “donut” spares, I somehow spent 1999-2009 with a car that came with a regular-size OEM spare. Actually got to use it once.
Tires are a lot more reliable then they used to be. Add to that the ubiquity of cell phones, and your chances of getting stranded somewhere with a flat aren’t really large enough to justify the extra expense of carrying a spare around every where u go.
The spare tire (or tyre for you UK blokes) is going the way of the dinosaurs; the writing is on the wall. Only cars for old folks will have them in the future. I’ve been to several design reviews over the years at major car manufacturers and each time the amount of room and importance dedicated to spare tire has decreased to the point where it would be hard to fit a bicycle tire in there. The amount of trunk space available is to the consumer is now king. Trunks are barely designed to fit a certain amount and size of standard luggage, baby buggies, golf bags and shaving kits. Space for a spare is a low (or no) priority on just about every small car; it’s becoming a luxury add on to larger cars and even there less so unless the car is being marketed to old geezers.
It’s called progress. Soon most tires will be run flats that can get you to a service designation without even having to use the cans. It’s just business; nothing personnel.
Actually, I do have another reason I prefer donut spares. When I was in college in the mid-90s, I experienced catastrophic tread separation at highway speeds. The tread just shredded off and the steel belt on the tires somehow separated and dented the crap out of the wheel well. By the time I coasted to a stop at the next exit (which luckily had a gas station), the tire was shredded and the wheel well was so dented it would not have been possible to throw in a full-size spare, as the wheel well would be digging into the tire. There was, however, enough room for a compact spare, so yay me! (Yes, I realize that is probably a one-in-a-million circustance, but, boy was I happy to have a donut spare.)
That the government wants auto makers to stop providing spare tires? No.
My new Fusion Hybrid doesn’t have a spare (instead it has a kit with fix-a-flat and a battery-powered inflator, presumably a hybrid battery is good enough for that.) I think it’s much more likely it’s due to weight savings, and thus boosting the MPG slightly-- it also could be because the hybrid batteries fill the empty space under the trunk where the spare tire typically goes.
So if you consider, “the government encourages car makers to maximize MPG”, then maybe the answer is, “it’s kind of correct?”
The elimination of the spare (even the “donut”) may have to do with meeting CAFE standards. With Ford going to Aluminum in their top-selling truck, it is clear that weight reduction is incredibly important to car makers. A donut spare (and jack) don’t weigh much, but it’s an item most first owners of a car never even see, let alone use.
I can’t remember having a flat tire on my own car since the seventies. The one and only flat I remember having since back in the day was on a rental car, and when I checked the spare *it *was flat! Thank Allah for cell phones.
I’m not claiming my luck is typical, but I wouldn’t miss a spare if it were gone. Would probably never even notice that I didn’t have one!
This thread wasn’t inspired by today’s “Hints from Heloise” newspaper column, was it? (“Dear Readers: If you are buying a new car, be sure to look in the trunk or ask the salesperson, ‘Does this car come with a spare tire?’”)
It’s partly “because of the 'guvmint” because eliminating the weight of a spare is one way to meet federally-mandated fuel efficiency standards.
I don’t understand your reasoning. If you don’t have a spare, what can AAA do for you, besides tow you to a tire shop (assuming one’s open at the time). What if you (or your passengers) have someplace you need to be?
Almost everybody here seems to think that it’s no problem to call the AAA (or RAC ) guy to change your tire (or tyre:) )
HUH?
The last time I called AAA (about 4 years ago), I waited for 3 hours. From 7 till 10 p.m. Yes, it ruined my day completely, forcing me to cancel the plans I had for that evening.
And I was in a large metropolitan area.
I hate to think how long the wait will be if you are on a minor road in the countryside.
I can change a flat in 10 minutes*----not likely to to ruin my day.
I will never buy a car without a reasonable spare tire.
*( And, yes, like bucketybuck, my manhood has something to do with that )
A flat tire is a rare, random event, so yes, I’d guess your experience was atypical.
My experience was perhaps atypical in the other direction. I owned my previous car for ten years and in that time I experienced three flat tires that required installing the spare in mid-trip. On another occasion I found a nail in the tire while the car was parked in my garage, and I was able to plug it myself; if I hadn’t caught that, it’s entirely possible that I would have done a fourth mid-trip tire change.
Damn electric starter; I used to be able to just crank my car and it would start; that’s what real men do.
Seriously, manufactures only care about the original owner and wants them to buy a new one every couple of years. Spares are for people who buy used cars.
I think the question’s been answered in all ways; I just wanted to come back to this specific point.
I think any sales person (using the term as loosely as possible) who uses the argument that “the government makes them do” this, that or the other thing or that “the government” has some hidden agenda preventing what the customer wants, when the real reasons are economic ones that benefit the seller, should have to stand for a penalty crotch kick as hard as the customer cares to deliver.
Yeah, gummint is bad, gummint is oppressive, gummint has a thousand rules that screw up our every day… but gummint as boogeyman to conceal seller-benefit choices just makes me want to wind up and see if I can make the guy’s balls pop out of his mouth.
Hell, I even have a sledgehammer in my trunk because I discovered my Mazda 3 rims have a habit of sticking/rusting to the hub so stubbornly, there’s no way to get them off. I’ve never been able to remove the wheel without using it. Not so with my other cars. I guess I must have extraordinarily bad luck. In my 22 years of driving (actually, there’s about six years there I didn’t have a car) I’ve been in vehicles that have experienced flats about ten times or so (five or six of those my own. I once even had two tires go flat on me simultaneously. I’m not a particulrly hard driver, either. Still on the original clutch after about 120K miles. Chicago roads are just hell on the car.)
One ruined evening every 5 years seems like one of those things that’s not worth worrying about. A spare tire is a solution to a single problem (a flat tire, in conditions where changing a wheel is practical), whereas a cell phone and AAA is a solution to lots of problems. In my 18 years of driving, I’ve never had a flat tire, but I’ve used AAA for dead batteries, dead alternators, an exploded clutch, a blown engine, locked keys, broken windshield… you get the idea.
Cars are pretty reliable now, and if one does leave you stranded, “flat tire” doesn’t seem all that high up on the list of reasons it will do so. I think all of my cars have donuts, but I don’t think I’d care all that much if they didn’t.
It sounds like the issue is not with the car manufacturers not providing a spare but the auto club not adjusting its not-inexpensive coverage to include something that the average motorist would presume they’ve covered by shelling out the membership fee. :smack:
Does the RAC have competition? I don’t use AAA, I have auto “club” coverage that came with my car insurance.
)