A run-flat that has done its job is finished, and it will not look finished. That is the awkward part. The sidewall is reinforced so the tyre can carry the car with no air in it at all, which is why you can cover fifty miles at fifty and see nothing wrong. What the tyre does not keep is its structure. The rubber wedge built into that sidewall gets flexed and heated well past what it is meant to take, and by the time you stop, the damage is inside where nobody can look at it.
So when we arrive and the tyre looks perfectly normal, the question is not how it looks. It is how far it went and how empty it was. If the warning light came on up on a car park level and you drove home on it, that tyre is scrap and you will hear so. The makers say the same thing: a run-flat that has been run flat gets replaced, not repaired. Nobody enjoys being told it, and it is a far better conversation at the kerb than at seventy miles an hour.
There is a short list of damage that cannot be repaired at any price, and it is worth knowing it. What we can do is come to the car in SM1, confirm which of them you are looking at, and put the right tyre on where it is standing rather than sending you off to find one. The wheel comes off in Rosehill, not on a ramp in Morden. Nothing is towed out of Benhilton or Belmont; the work finishes there.
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Run-flats are common on the sort of cars that live around here, and the town keeps handing them chances to be used. A pothole on the way in from the A232, a kerbed ramp in a car park, then a couple of miles home because the car still felt fine. That last part is what settles it. We would rather come and look at a tyre than have anyone guess from the outside.
Six miles from the town centre with the tyre down. It looked untouched from outside. Inside, the wedge had crumbled to dust along one section, which is what a run-flat does when it has been used as designed.
Multi-storey ramps and shallow bays catch wheels constantly. Here the alloy took the hit and the tyre was untouched, so we said so, set the pressures and left it alone.
Stiff sidewalls hide their damage well. Running a flat hand slowly around the wall finds the raised area that the eye slides straight over, and a raised area means that tyre comes off.
Look on the sidewall for letters like RFT, ROF, ZP or SSR alongside the size, then look in the boot. No spare, no jack and a pressure monitoring system on the dashboard usually adds up to run-flats.
If it was never driven on while flat, and the damage is small and central, some makes allow it. In practice, by the time anyone rings us it has been driven on, and then the answer is no. Fatigue cannot be seen from outside.
Many people do, and the ride improves. The catch is the boot: with no spare and no way of getting home, a puncture becomes a phone call. Fine if you know that in advance, a nuisance if you discover it on a wet night.
Not automatically, but they should match across an axle for construction as well as size. A run-flat next to a standard tyre gives you two different sidewall stiffnesses on one axle, and the car will not behave the same way in both directions.
We take it away and dispose of it properly. There is nothing useful anybody can do with a scrapped run-flat, and one left leaning against a wall outside the house tends to attract two more within the week.
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