A tyre can look completely normal from the driver's door and be flat on the ground. The weight of the car squashes the contact patch out of sight, and from standing height, in the dark, all you see is a tyre with a slightly wider footprint than the one next to it. People walk round a car at night, decide everything is fine, drive off, and destroy a tyre that could have been repaired.
So the check worth doing takes about ten seconds and involves crouching. Get low enough to see where the tyre meets the road on each corner and compare them. A properly inflated tyre has a visible curve between the sidewall and the ground. A flat one is squared off and bulging outward at the bottom, and once you have seen the difference once you cannot unsee it. In poor light, put a phone torch on the ground and look along the line of the car, because a low light source makes the difference obvious. If one corner is sitting wrong, that is the moment to stop rather than the moment to set off. We are out across N5 all night, every night.
Tyres pick their moment badly. It is two in the morning on Blackstock Road, or ten past six on a Sunday with the car on a driveway in Aberdeen Park and somewhere to be by eight. Level in Drayton Park, sloping in Aberdeen Park: we set the car straight first. Underground parking in Aberdeen Park or Drayton Park is worth flagging.
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The residential streets around Highbury Fields and Highbury New Park are quiet and dark after midnight, and cars here often sit in the same space for days between short trips. That is the pattern that lets a slow leak go completely unnoticed until the car is genuinely flat. Getting into the habit of a ten second crouch before setting off, particularly on a car that has stood over a weekend, is the cheapest tyre check there is.
A driver near Highbury Barn had walked round the car at eleven at night and seen nothing. Crouching down at the front nearside showed a tyre sitting almost on its rim.
A late call off Aberdeen Park where the driver had spotted it by putting a phone light on the ground. That is exactly the trick, and it takes seconds.
A flat found on a terrace off Blackstock Road before the car moved. The puncture was repairable, and it stayed repairable because nobody drove on it.
Crouch down and look at where each tyre meets the road. A correctly inflated one has a clear curve between the sidewall and the ground. A flat one is squared off and bulging at the bottom. Comparing the four takes ten seconds.
For that check, yes, particularly if you rest it on the ground and look along the line of the car. Low light shows up the shape of the contact patch far better than holding the torch at waist height and pointing it at the wheel.
Stop as soon as it is safe to and call. How far you have gone decides whether the tyre survives. A short distance is usually recoverable. Any real distance and the inner liner will have gone, which ends the possibility of a repair.
Every night of the year. Typical arrival across N5 and the surrounding streets is 30 to 60 minutes, we bring our own lighting, and the car stays exactly where you parked it.
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