The specification of a tyre is not just its size. Two tyres reading the same width, profile and diameter can be certified to carry different loads at different speeds, and only one of them may be what the car was approved with. That distinction survives the hour of the night. At two in the morning, with a driver standing in the cold wanting to get home, the easy thing is to fit whatever is on the van in the right size and say nothing at all about it.
We do not do that, and it is worth setting out what happens instead. Before anything comes off, we read the failed tyre and the placard in the door shut, then check what we are carrying against both. If the correct load index and speed rating are on board, that is what goes on. If they are not, you get told, and you get the choice: a tyre that meets the specification brought out to you, or the closest thing we have with a return visit arranged to put it right afterwards. Nobody enjoys having that conversation in the middle of the night, and it is a considerably better conversation than the one that starts a month later.
Shift work and tyre trouble go together, and not in a good way. Whoever comes out can repair as well as replace, so a nail found at that hour does not automatically cost you a tyre, whether the car is in Sheldon Square or at the roadside. Tight in Edgware Road, easy in Westbourne Terrace: neither stops the job. Level in Little Venice, sloping in Sheldon Square: we set the car straight first.
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Praed Street never really empties, with the station on one side and the hospital on the other, so a fair number of our calls here come from people who have to be moving early rather than people with a spare morning ahead of them. That is exactly the pressure that makes fitting whatever fits tempting, and it is why the placard gets read first. A tyre that is wrong is wrong for the next several years, and the twenty minutes it might have saved you at two in the morning is a poor trade for that.
A car near Praed Street needed one tyre overnight, and the only thing we had in the size was rated a step below what the placard asked for. The owner heard about it before the wheel came off rather than afterwards.
Most of the time the correct specification is already on board, because the common car, SUV and 4x4 fitments travel with the fitter. That is the point of loading the van for the area rather than for one job.
The door shut placard is the reference rather than the tyre that failed, because the tyre that failed may itself have been the wrong one. It takes about ten seconds to open the door and look at it.
No. Size is only part of the specification. The load index and the speed rating have to meet what the car was approved with, and we take those from the placard rather than assuming the tyre that failed was the correct one in the first place.
Then you hear about it on the phone where we can tell that early, and at the car if it only becomes clear once we are there. The options are the correct tyre brought out to you or a return visit, and we will be straight about which is quicker for you.
Not at all, and in some sizes it is the only thing available. Higher is always acceptable and lower is not. The two tyres on the same axle should match one another regardless of what the other axle happens to be running.
The size off the sidewall if you can read it safely, or the registration and the model, plus roughly where the car is standing. That is enough for us to load the right tyre before setting off instead of discovering the problem after we arrive.
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