Run-flat tyres have a limit built into them and it is a good deal smaller than most drivers assume. The reinforced sidewall is doing the job the air normally does, holding the weight of the car up on rubber alone, and it does that by generating an enormous amount of heat. The allowance quoted for most of them is around fifty miles at fifty miles an hour, and that is a maximum, on a lightly loaded car, on a cool day. Loaded up, in warm weather, or pressed a little harder than fifty, the real figure falls away quickly and nothing tells you it is falling.
What makes that dangerous is that the car does not feel wrong. Not feeling wrong is the entire purpose of the tyre, and it is the reason cars fitted with them are required to monitor their own pressures, because without the warning you would simply carry on unaware. Drive well past the allowance and the reinforcement breaks down inside, the tread and the sidewall come apart at speed, and the failure arrives as suddenly as any other burst. There is no reading it by feel first. Once the warning has appeared, the only arithmetic that matters is the distance to somewhere you can stop, not the distance to where you were going.
The rim is the expensive part, and driving on a burst tyre is how it gets destroyed. We come out to the exact spot, Phillimore or anywhere else in Kensington, with the right size on the van and fit it there. Whether it is Gloucester Road in rush hour or Cromwell Road at midnight, we answer. On Cromwell Road, day or night, Holland Park included, arrival across Greater London runs 30 to 60 minutes.
Burst tyre replacement in Kensington is part of our wider 24-hour emergency callout cover. For burst tyre replacement in Kensington, call 07717 389637 or get a price for your tyre.
A great many of the cars parked around W8 came with run-flats and no spare wheel at all, which means the fifty miles is genuinely all there is. It also means it gets spent quickly, because a warning that appears near Gloucester Road and gets ignored across town has used a serious share of the allowance before the driver has thought about it properly. If the light comes on, the useful question is not whether the car still feels right. It will. The question is where you can be stopped within the next mile or two.
A car came in off the Cromwell Road having covered a long way with the pressure warning showing. The tyre had held together, but the inside of it had broken up completely and there was nothing left to save.
A driver picked up a screw and kept going because the car felt entirely normal. The puncture itself would have been a straightforward repair. The distance driven on it was what ruled that out.
A warning came on near Cornwall Gardens and the driver pulled into the first residents bay they found rather than pressing on. The tyre came off, the damage was assessed properly, and the wheel was undamaged.
Take the fifty at fifty as a ceiling rather than an allowance, and assume you have less than that. Weight in the car, warm weather and any speed above the quoted figure all shorten it, and none of them announce themselves. The sensible plan is to get to a safe stopping place and stop there.
No, and this is where people lose a tyre they could have kept. Once the sidewall has been carrying the car there is no way to inspect what has happened to the reinforcement inside it, so the tyre cannot be certified as sound whatever the original puncture looked like. Stopping early is what preserves the option.
Barely, which is the point of it. The car stays level and the steering stays normal, and that is precisely why the pressure monitoring is mandatory on these cars. If the warning appears, believe it rather than judging by how the car feels, because how it feels is designed to tell you nothing.
Yes. They are considerably stiffer than a conventional tyre and they need the right machine to get on and off without damaging the bead, which is on the van along with the common car, SUV and 4x4 sizes. The work happens in the bay the car is already sitting in.
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