When a tyre is badly under inflated the sidewall stops being a wall and becomes a hinge. The weight of the car folds it outward, and the inside of that fold sits directly against the edge of the rim. Every rotation presses the flange into the same crease. The inner liner goes first, shredding into loose rubber, and then the casing cords in the crease begin to be cut from the inside outwards. Heat finishes the job, because a folding sidewall generates a great deal of it and heat is what breaks the bond between rubber and cord.
None of that is visible. From outside the tyre still looks like a tyre, and if you put air back in it will usually hold. What has happened is that the structure has been cut through where nobody can see it, and structure like that fails all at once rather than gradually. Which is why a tyre run soft along a road such as New Cross Road tends to end in a burst rather than in a slow deflation. If it does let go while you are moving, hold the wheel, stay off the brake, and let the speed fall away before you steer anywhere.
Tell us four things on the phone and the van finds you first time. Where you are stopped and which direction you were travelling; the make and model; the size off the sidewall of any tyre on the car; and whether you are somewhere exposed. Stopped on Creek Road in the dark counts, and we will say so on the call. Blocked drive in Deptford? Open kerb in New Cross? Either works. Which street in Greenwich, which way the car sits in Evelyn, and we are set.
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New Cross Road is the A2 and it moves. Evelyn Street carries heavy traffic toward Greenwich all day. Neither gives you much room to stop, and both are exactly the sort of road where a tyre that has been quietly running soft around the High Street finally comes apart. If a tyre is asking for air more than once a month, deal with it while the car is parked somewhere sensible in SE8, rather than finding out what it does at trunk road speed with a lorry sitting on your tail.
A tyre driven soft for a couple of miles was pumped up afterwards and held pressure perfectly well. Off the rim, the inner face carried a grey scuffed ring where the flange had been working, and the cords beneath it were cut.
A slow leak topped up every few days and otherwise ignored. By the time the sidewall opened on the A2, that tyre had been running below its proper pressure for the best part of a fortnight.
A burst that began life as an ordinary nail in the tread. Had the wheel come off when the pressure first dropped it would have been a patch. It became a new tyre purely because it was driven on.
Not necessarily, and this is the one that catches people. If it was genuinely run soft, the rim edge has been cutting into the inside of the sidewall the whole time you drove. The tyre can hold pressure and still be structurally finished. It needs to come off the wheel and be looked at from the inside.
Because the injury is on the inner face of the sidewall, in the crease the tyre made when it folded. That surface faces the rim and is hidden by the wheel. The usual sign is a grey or scuffed band running right around the inside, and it only appears once the tyre is off.
As far as it takes to get out of a live lane and no further. A few yards to reach a safe verge costs the tyre nothing. A mile or two on a properly soft tyre is normally the end of it, and on a trunk road like the A2 you are also risking the failure happening at speed.
No. The cords have been cut rather than pierced, and the sidewall sits outside the area any repair is permitted in regardless of the cause. The only honest answer is a replacement, which we carry and fit where the car has come to a stop.
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