Alert - Aged Tires pose a Driving Hazard?
by Tran, Harry ~ November 16th, 2008. Filed under: Car Care.Abc News found retailers selling aged tires as brand new
There is a misinformation in the tire industry that as long as the tire has never been on a car that tire is considered brand new and safe. But ABC News did a coverage where they went undercover and followed the tire industries guidelines and discovered that many tires being sold to the consumers are actually aged tires.
While an aged tire has never been driven on and has perfectly new threading on the tire, it is considered aged because of the date that this tire was manufactured and left sitting on the shelves waiting to be sold. The industry experts say that tire blow out is a big contributor to car related accidents and death. They also mention that in other countries such as Britain, there are warnings given to the public not to purchase and use tires that are 6 years of age or older.
Why isn’t the United States consumer aware of these potential dangers related to aged tires? When we purchase tires we are told that those tires are brand new tires and that they are considered safe as long as the threading is greater than 1/16″ remaining. But according to the video they say that a tire which is too old for the road may actually lose its entire threading and suffer a blow out leaving the driver completely without control of their vehicle.
To figure out how old your tires are you can check the date they were created.
There is a DOT code found on most tires that are written in a obscured fashion such as 414 or 3102.
The way that this code is read is that this tire for the first set of codes was manufactured on the 41st week of 1994, the second set of numbers state that this tire was manufactured on the 31st week of 2002.
This is a picture taken from my tire that was purchased at a Costco, in South San Francisco, CA in June of 2007.
Per the instructions of the video, and as a safety check that takes only a few seconds, this tire is marked as 1307. This would mean that it was manufactured in 2007 and since it is 2008 right now I am not too concerned of when the 13th week of 2007 was.
I would like to emphasize that tire safety is of the utmost importance in maintaining a safe integrity while on the road, for a vehicle moving at 65 mph the tires are the only contact point for the car and the ground.
For more information follow the link to the video.
November 18th, 2008 at 10:28 am
Bull***t,
I have worked at Firestone for 3 years and not once have we had a complaint in regards to tires being too old to be put on someone’s car. We sell tires that are brand new that have never been put to the road before and offer 36,000 mile warranties. Do you think we would do that if we were selling used tires?
Hell no what kind of business do you think we run if the tires we sell are always falling off peoples cars. Those guys on abc are just finding things to put on tv because there’s nothing else to talk about.
November 18th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
I think this is scary. Why would they put us in danger to make a profit. Are our lives worth a few dollars to the tire makers?
November 18th, 2008 at 9:02 pm
Terrance,
I understand your concern as it seems like this ABC video is targeting all tire manufacturers as evil sellers of bad tires, but I really don’t think that this is the scenario.
Although I am aware of your concern, I think this is more of an informative video that people should just be more aware of what they are buying, and if something is said to be new, they should still do some due diligence to make sure that the tire hasn’t been sitting around too long in a warehouse.
I am not a tire expert, but I do believe in self-responsibility and can’t always blame the dealer or the expert for something that goes wrong because I didn’t try to do my own research. That is my reasoning to write this post, it is to inform people that this may happen and since it can result in loss of life, I felt it was important people check their tires.
Nothing to offend was intended.