Rubber has a shelf life whether the car moves or not. Every tyre carries a four digit date code on the sidewall, set in an oval, and it reads as week and year: 2419 is the twenty fourth week of 2019. Tread depth tells you how much use a tyre has had. The date code tells you how much time it has had, and time is what turns a flexible compound brittle. The oils migrate out, the surface hardens, and fine cracks open in the sidewall and in the base of the tread grooves.
A tyre in that condition can have most of its tread left and still fail suddenly, because a hardened sidewall has lost the flexibility it needs to absorb an ordinary impact. Which is why the cars this catches are so often the well kept ones with low mileage, sitting on driveways around Emerson Park and Ardleigh Green and then taken out for a proper run on the A127, where the speed and the heat find what the mileage never did. On a car like that, tread depth is the wrong measurement. The date code is the one to read.
The rim is the expensive part, and driving on a burst tyre is how it gets destroyed. We come out to the exact spot, Ardleigh Green or anywhere else in Hornchurch, with the right size on the van and fit it there. Old tyres leave Elm Park, Emerson Park and RM11 with us, every time. You watch it happen in Emerson Park, or at the kerb in Ardleigh Green. A RM11 address in Harold Wood and one in Hacton are the same round.
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There are a lot of carefully looked after, lightly used cars sitting on driveways around Emerson Park and Ardleigh Green, and they are precisely the ones this catches out. The tread looks almost new because it is almost new. The rubber has been quietly hardening for a decade, and the A127 is where that gets discovered. Reading four digits off a sidewall takes a few seconds, and on a low mileage car it tells you far more than any tread gauge will.
A low mileage car near Ardleigh Green lost a tyre on a fast road with more than half its tread remaining. The date code put it well over a decade old and the sidewall was crazed all the way round.
A car used mostly for short local runs had fine cracking in the bottom of the tread grooves, which is age rather than wear. Both fronts were changed before either of them did anything sudden.
A driver in Hacton had a spare under the boot floor with a date code older than every tyre on the car. It had never been used and it was not usable.
On the sidewall, at the end of the long moulded code, inside an oval containing four digits. The first two are the week and the last two the year, so 3521 is the thirty fifth week of 2021. It is on one side only, so you may have to look at the inner face.
There is no single legal figure for an ordinary car, but rubber a decade old deserves a hard look regardless of tread, and older than that on a fast road is not a gamble we would take. Crazing in the sidewall or at the base of the grooves settles it either way.
It is the opposite. Low mileage is what allows a tyre to reach an age its tread would never have survived. Standing still also flat spots and hardens rubber, so a lightly used car often has worse tyres than one that gets driven.
Not once the rubber has started to craze. A patch has to bond to sound, flexible material, and hardened cracked rubber is neither. We would rather say that on arrival than fit a repair into a tyre that is finished anyway.
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