Tread carefully when buying tyres
James Foxall says buying part-worn tyres is a gamble that's not worth taking
There can be few more irritating things than getting a puncture in a new tyre. But do you then replace it or get it fixed? There is after all a hefty price differential: a new tyre can cost upwards of £100, whereas you can get a tyre repaired for about a quarter of that. The answer seems obvious. But is it?
Tyres go through an awful lot in their daily life and you definitely don't want one to fail suddenly. The most recent Department for Transport stats show that illegal, defective or underinflated tyres account for more than half of the motorway crashes that are caused by vehicle faults. And you would imagine that a tyre that's been repaired is more likely to fail.
Not so, according to tyre maker Continental. "A puncture repair should last the life of a tyre if it's been done properly," said technical services manager Steve Howat. "But whether tyres can be repaired is restricted by a British Standard. This controls the size of the hole, and how badly the tyre has been damaged by the puncture."
Loosely speaking, if the damage to the tyre is on what's known as the shoulder - the part between the treaded area and the sidewall - it probably isn't repairable. And if there are any wires visible within the tyre, it definitely isn't.
Howat revealed: "We've seen some horrendous repairs where the tyre has been punctured right on the edge of the belts and someone's put a plug patch in there." So while tyre repairs can be OK, replacing punctured or worn-out tyres with second-hand ones with an unknown history isn't a good idea.
Search "part-worn" on the internet and some websites could almost convince you otherwise. Almost. Then I saw that a dealer has just been fined £26,000 and been given a nine-month suspended sentence for supplying dangerous goods, in his case tyres balder than I am.
If I needed further discouragement, a chat with the National Tyre Distributors' Association (NTDA) provided it. Director Stefan Hay told me: "We work closely with the Trading Standards Institute investigating part-worn tyres and the findings can be horrific. We've even seen tyres being sold that have been repaired with the nail that punctured them still in place."
You might think this is because of a lack of regulation. But actually it's down to the perennial problem of a lack of enforcement. The result, according to the NTDA, is that part-worn tyres are big business in Britain, despite the safety concerns.
"You really don't know what you're getting when you a buy a part-worn tyre," said Hay. "If I was on a strict budget, I'd buy new budget tyres instead. You can get them for £35 and you know you're getting an undamaged tyre with 8mm of tread. With most part-worns, you're lucky if you get much more than 2mm."
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