When a wheel stops turning while the car is still moving, the tyre stops rolling and starts grinding. A single patch of rubber is dragged across the road surface under the full weight of that corner, and it comes off in seconds. Anti lock braking is supposed to prevent this, and mostly it does, but it is not absolute. A wet drain cover, a polished patch of tarmac at a junction, a diesel spill or a sensor fault will all let a wheel lock long enough to do the damage, and a very hard stop on a poor surface can manage it too.
What you are left with is a flat spot: a section of tread that is thinner than the rest and a tyre that is no longer round. The immediate symptom is a thumping that rises with road speed, and most people put it down to a lost balance weight. The balance is not the problem. Under that scrubbed patch there is less rubber protecting the casing than anywhere else on the tyre, and the material there has been through a burst of heat that did it no favours. It is now the weakest point on that tyre, and it is the point that gives way when the tyre is hot and working hard.
Get yourself somewhere safe first, and only then start ringing anybody. That means as far off the carriageway as you can get, hazards on, and everybody out on the far side of the car. A the Queenstown Road area cul-de-sac or a Clapham Junction main road, tell us which. A tight terrace in Clapham Junction or a narrow bay on Queenstown Road is usually workable. A SW11 address in Shaftesbury Estate and one in Lavender Hill are the same round.
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Lavender Hill is a long descent into congestion, and a car coming down it into stop and start traffic brakes harder and far more often than the same car does anywhere flat. Add a greasy surface at a junction and a locked wheel stops being an exotic event. If your car has thumped rhythmically since a hard stop, do not assume the balance has gone. A flat spot is easy to find with a hand on the tread and it is not a fault that improves with mileage.
A driver dated a new rhythmic noise to a hard stop on a wet junction near Clapham Junction. A hand run around the tread found a scrubbed patch on one tyre with the tread pattern almost gone from it.
A car had been to two places for a wheel balance without improvement. The tyre was not out of balance, it was out of round, and nothing done on a balancer was ever going to address that.
A tyre carrying a known flat spot let go on a longer run some weeks later, and it opened up exactly where the rubber had been ground away rather than anywhere else.
ABS releases pressure once it detects a wheel decelerating too fast, but it needs grip to work with and it needs its sensors reporting. On a wet drain cover, spilled diesel or polished tarmac there may be nothing to release into, and a faulty sensor at one corner takes that wheel out of the system entirely.
No. Balancing corrects weight distribution around the wheel. A flat spot is a change of shape, so the tyre is physically not round any more and no weight anywhere on the rim fixes that. If a vibration survives a proper balance, stop looking at weights and look at the tread.
It does not work that way. The surrounding tread wears at a normal rate while the flat area, which is now slightly out of contact for part of each rotation, wears differently again. The difference tends to persist and the noise generally gets worse rather than better.
Run a hand slowly around the tread with the wheel off the ground or turned onto lock. A flat spot feels like a smooth section where the pattern is shallower, often with a slightly polished surface, and it is usually about the length of your palm.
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