Half of every tyre on a parked car is facing the underside of the vehicle, and that is the half where the trouble usually starts. The inner shoulder takes the worst of any alignment error, so it wears first and it wears steeply. It also collects the cuts, because the inner face is what meets a concrete upstand or a kerb edge as you swing out of a tight space. Nothing about that damage is visible from the pavement. You can walk round a car, look at four tyres, see plenty of tread and be entirely wrong.
At night the problem doubles, because a torch only shows you what is pointed at it, and what is pointed at you is the good side. The fix is simple and takes about a minute. Turn the steering onto full lock and the front tyre swings its inner face out where you can get a light onto it. On the rear you have to crouch and shine up under the arch. That is the check we make as a matter of course on a night callout, before anybody decides which tyre is actually the problem, and it is the reason a job that started as one flat sometimes ends with a second tyre coming off.
The clock does not change the standard. We work by van lighting, wherever the car is stopped, on a driveway in Westminster or at the kerb, and if the tyre cannot be saved you get told at that hour rather than in the morning. Level in Westminster, sloping in Grosvenor Gardens: we set the car straight first. Underground parking in Buckingham Palace Road or the Ebury Street area is worth flagging. The SW1 postcode and a street in the Ebury Street area: that is enough.
24-hour tyre callout in Victoria is part of our wider 24-hour emergency callout cover. For 24-hour tyre callout in Victoria, call 07717 389637 or send us your details for a price.
Underground car parks and hotel forecourts across Westminster are tight and badly lit, and the face of a tyre that meets a concrete upstand on the way out of one is almost always the inner face. That is the face nobody inspects, and after dark nobody inspects any of it. Before a very early start, put the steering onto full lock and get a light onto the inside edge of both front tyres. It takes half a minute, and it is how you find the damage before the damage finds you.
A car sitting in a hotel forecourt showed comfortable tread all the way round from where the owner was standing. On full lock the inner edge of the nearside front had worn away to almost nothing.
A late callout for a punctured rear turned up a deep cut on the inner shoulder of the front tyre on the same side, picked up on a car park ramp and never seen.
A rear tyre inspected on a side street with a lamp held under the arch. The inner face had been rubbing on something for weeks and had a polished band across it.
Put the steering on full lock and the front tyres turn their inner faces outward, which puts the whole shoulder in reach of a phone light. The rears need a lamp held under the arch. Both are worth doing before an early start rather than after the car is already moving.
Because most alignment errors tip the wheel or point it slightly inward, and the inner shoulder then does more of the work than it was meant to. A kerb hard enough to knock the settings out does not feel like much at the time, and the wear it causes only shows up on the face you never see.
Not on its own. If the wear pattern is one sided, something has moved and the new tyre will go the same way. We will show you the old tyre and tell you plainly whether the wear is even, so you know whether the car needs its geometry looked at as well.
Yes, and we do it without being asked. We run 24 hours a day across SW1 and there is no sense fitting one tyre and driving away from a worse one on the opposite corner. It takes a few minutes with the car exactly where it is parked.
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