(LS) — Most people don’t fully appreciate the important role good and suitable tires play to the safe operation of their cars. If you’re driving on worn out tires or tires that were never built for the vehicle on which they’re mounted, then you’re putting your own safety and that of your car and passengers at risk.
Think of it like this: your tires are the feet and shoes of your car. You can’t walk or run properly with broken feet, and you need to be wearing the proper shoes to successfully do any activity. Despite the old commercial to the contrary, you can’t play basketball in high heels. On the flip side, you shouldn’t wear high tops with a prom dress. When your running shoes wear out, you must buy new ones, or your feet will be soon to follow. Comedian Demetri Martin has a bit about wearing flip flops. When you wear flip flops, you have to answer an important question first: will anyone be chasing me today? It’s a joke with a point. You simply can’t do certain things in certain footwear.
The same goes for your tires. You need to outfit your car with suitable tires and then make sure they are rotated regularly and are changed when worn out, or your car simply cannot function properly. You need functional and suitable tires to turn, swerve or change lanes properly. You can’t argue with the numbers. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration claims that tire failure causes 8,000 accidents every year.
Still, while most people can tell you when they last changed their oil or got a tune-up, they can’t remember how long it’s been since they changed their tires or even checked the air. Not only is proper tire maintenance important for safe driving, but also in proving the liability of any manufacturer who may have provided you with defective tires – a surprisingly common occurrence. The NHTSA took 139 reports of Firestone tire defects in 2001 alone, and defective tires most often result in sidewall blowouts.
Here’s how sidewall blowouts work. The critical area of the tire is the contact patch, the point at which the tire flattens out against the road due to the weight of the car bearing down on it. The heat caused by friction at this point couples with the heat inside the tire due to the air compressed inside. Tires are complex pieces of machinery that depend upon several layers of different materials to treat heat and resist friction. Defects in the tire’s design or assembly can cause an inability to handle the heat and friction, resulting in a sidewall blowout. When that occurs, the manufacturer is liable for any harm caused by rollovers and other accidents.
However, tire failure is more often caused by under-inflation of tires, which is the fault of the vehicle owner. The NHTSA estimates that 10,000 injuries every year in the United States could be avoided if car owners would properly monitor their tire pressure. As a result, most manufacturers will deny their responsibility for any rollover or blowout accident by blaming the driver for not keeping his or her tires filled or not changing them regularly. The only way to combat that claim is to maintain air pressure. That way, when one tire blows out due to a tire defect, the remaining ones will be full and in good condition, supporting your claims of a manufacturer’s defect.
Safety isn’t the only reason to keep your tires well-inflated. You can save money at the gas pump too. The better inflated your tires are, the more of the tire that makes contact with road at the contact patch, allowing for quicker acceleration, faster stopping and less energy required to operate the car. According to Popular Mechanics, when each tire is under-inflated by as little as 10 psi, a reduction in fuel efficiency of 3 percent occurs. So, if all four tires are under-inflated, that’s a 12 percent reduction in fuel efficiency. In 2001, the Department of Transportation estimated that between 60 and 80 percent of all cars on the road had under-inflated tires. Many of the tires on these cars are under-inflated by as much as 20 percent, leading to a massive amount of wasted gas in this country – approximately 1.25 billion gallons of gas per year according to the Department of Energy. While newer cars do have Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems, most of them only detect a problem when one tire is 20 percent less inflated than the other.
Whether you are motivated by safety, product liability, or rising prices at the gas pumps, the time has come to invest in a tire gauge and start checking those tires. A few minutes every month can cave you hundreds of dollars every year… and maybe your life too.
