Tyre rubber is not a fixed material. It softens as it warms and stiffens as it cools, and below about seven degrees that change is enough to alter both how the tyre behaves and how it looks. Fine perishing cracks in a sidewall close up in warm weather and are easy to walk past. On a cold night the rubber contracts, the crazing opens, and damage that has been developing quietly through two summers is suddenly obvious under a torch.
So a fair share of the calls we take in the dark months are not punctures at all. Somebody has gone out to the car, looked properly for once because a warning light was on, and found a network of fine lines around the sidewall shoulder. The cracks did not appear overnight. The cold simply stopped hiding them.
Perishing cannot be reversed and it cannot be repaired. Once the crazing sits in the part of the wall that flexes, the tyre is finished whatever the tread depth, and it is usually a low mileage car that gets caught. We look at it where the car is parked, at whatever hour you found it.
A tyre going down at midnight leaves you with three bad options and one good one. That is what round-the-clock dispatch actually means here: a van, stock, a balancer and a fitter, sent to where the car is standing in SW16 at whatever hour you ring. Midnight in Thornton Heath, midday in Green Lane, the same call either way. School run in Green Lane or 1am in Pollards Hill, we answer the same. SW16 takes in Pollards Hill and Norbury, and we work the lot.
24-hour tyre callout in Norbury is part of our wider 24-hour emergency callout across London and the home counties cover. For 24-hour tyre callout in Norbury, call 07717 389637 or ask us for a quote.
Most of these streets have no off street parking, so cars stand at the kerb through every winter taking salted spray on one side and sunlight on the other. That is a hard life for sidewall rubber, and it is why perishing turns up here on cars with plenty of tread left. We come out with our own lighting and look at both faces of the tyre.
A driver on a terraced street in SW16 went out to check a pressure warning and found the sidewall covered in fine lines. Six millimetres of tread and eleven years of standing at a kerb. Tread was never going to finish it.
A car near Norbury station had shallow surface marks in the rubber that stopped well short of the flex zone. Nothing structural, nothing exposed, nothing to spend on. The owner had braced for four tyres and paid for a look.
Cracking is worst on whichever side gets the sun, and on a kerb parked car that is the face you cannot see from the pavement. On one vehicle off Green Lane the outer walls looked healthy and the inner walls were crazed.
Because cold rubber contracts and stiffens, so the cracks pull open instead of sitting closed. Nothing about the tyre has changed between summer and midwinter except its temperature. If anything the cold months are the better time to inspect a sidewall.
There is no legal age limit on a car tyre, which puts the judgement on the rubber rather than the calendar. What matters is where the cracking sits. Fine lines in the base of the tread grooves are common and rarely serious. Lines in the sidewall shoulder end it.
No. Nothing outside the tread is repairable, and perishing is not damage in one spot anyway. It is the whole surface of the rubber hardening and losing the ability to flex, so there is nothing to patch and nowhere to put a patch.
We run all night, all year, and cold nights are among the busier ones. If the tyre is holding air and the car is parked safely we will happily tell you to leave it until daylight.
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