The spare wheel is the one part of a car that is expected to work perfectly after years of being ignored. It sits under the boot floor losing air the entire time, because every tyre does, and nobody ever opens the hatch to check it. A space saver makes this worse. It is inflated a good deal harder than a normal tyre in order to be that narrow, so it has further to fall, and the point at which it becomes useless arrives sooner. Plenty of them are effectively flat by the time anybody meets them.
At three in the morning in the rain that discovery costs you the whole plan. Then come the follow up problems: the jack that was never checked, the brace that lives somewhere else in the car, the retaining bolt seized solid, and on a great many newer cars no spare at all, just a can and a compressor in a foam tray. None of that is a failing on the driver's part, it is simply what unattended equipment does. It is also why our answer at night is the correct tyre fitted onto your own wheel where you are standing, rather than a temporary wheel that leaves you with the same job to do tomorrow.
Private hire and taxi drivers ring us more than anyone, and always at the same hours. So the job gets done where the car is, at the hour it happened, anywhere in SW8: repaired to British Standard where the tyre allows it, replaced from stock where it does not. A tight terrace in Albert Embankment or a narrow bay on South Lambeth Road is usually workable. Steep camber in the Wandsworth Road area? We move a few metres, South Lambeth or anywhere else. The SW8 postcode and a street in South Lambeth: that is enough.
24-hour tyre callout in Vauxhall is part of our wider 24-hour emergency callout cover. For 24-hour tyre callout in Vauxhall, call 07717 389637 or send us your details for a price.
There is no good place to open a boot on the Albert Embankment at two in the morning, and the A3036 is not somewhere to stand and find out that a spare has been soft for years. That is the argument for checking the thing on a dry afternoon rather than meeting it at night. If you are already out there, get clear of the live lanes first and then ring, and leave the boot floor where it is. We would far rather bring the correct tyre to you than have you fit something that becomes tomorrow's problem.
A driver who had done everything right had the boot open within a minute of stopping. The spare had lost most of its pressure over several years and was in no state to be fitted to anything.
The wheel brace had been borrowed and never returned, which nobody discovers until the night they need it. The jack was present and useless on its own.
A newer car had a compressor and a canister where the spare would once have been. The tyre had a split in it, so neither was going to be any use at all.
Twice a year is plenty and once a year is far better than never. Take it out, put a gauge on it and look at the date on the sidewall, because a spare that has been under there for a decade is an old tyre regardless of the fact that it is unused.
Not safely. A space saver is narrow precisely because it runs at a much higher pressure, so an underinflated one is carrying the car on almost nothing and will overheat quickly. If it is soft and you have no way to inflate it properly, it is not the answer to the problem.
That is now normal and it makes no difference to us. We carry the common car, SUV and 4x4 sizes on board and fit the correct tyre onto your existing wheel, which leaves you finished rather than driving on something temporary with the real job still ahead.
Every night, all year. Nights are ordinary working hours here rather than a special arrangement, and we bring our own lighting, so a dark stretch of road is a place we work rather than a problem to solve first.
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