Lessons in tyre changing
Posted by Piers Ward at 2:40PM on Wednesday 23 July, 2008 1 Comment
Had a bit of a lesson in life the other day - never, ever, under any circumstances, even if your life, wife's life, etc depends on it, fit non-standard wheels and tyres to a car if you're doing long distances.
I was in Spain covering the Spanish Baja - which you'll read about soon in TG magazine - and we'd borrowed a Volkswagen Touareg off VW Spain.
One puncture later and we were stranded for five hours. There was a space saver spare in the car, but this wasn't inflated. The kit to inflate it in the car didn't work. The range on a space saver is 200km and it has a speed limit of 80km/h. The Touareg had got weird size wheels fitted as part of an individual pack on the car (19 inches), so there wasn't another set of rubber within 200km.
As we were 250km from where we wanted to be, as it was a Friday night, as we were in a foreign country, things did not look rosy.
Fortunately, I'm a journalist for Top Gear and some sort of wasp's nest of a storm kicked off in Spain about this.
The Director of VW Spain was disturbed on a Friday night. The under-director of VW Spain was disturbed. I got a phone call from the head of the press office in VW Spain to offer some sort of explanation as to why the might of VW couldn't find a spare tyre for us within a 200km radius. Why they could only offer us a spare car for 24 hours because it wasn't a mechanical fault, despite the fact that no garage would be open on the Saturday to fix it.
The explanation, incidentally, was that VW couldn't possibly stock every single wheel and tyre combination that it offers. You'll understand if that still didn't soothe our tempers.
But here's the rub. What if you were an ordinary customer? What if you'd spent £35,000-odd on a Touareg and VW Assistance couldn't offer you a spare? This is, after all, a car billed as being pretty good off-road, yet doesn't come with a proper spare.
To be fair, this would be kind of understandable - modern cars need to cater to lots of needs, the Touareg needs all the boot space it can get so you fit a smaller space saver.
But if you're fitting weird-sized wheels and tyres to your cars, there should be some sort of moral obligation to make sure the supply chain is there to fix it if things go wrong. Either that or fit a proper spare tyre.
As it was, the only way we solved it was repeated phone calls to the UK to get things moving along properly.
The lessons then are, if you've got a space saver or can of foam, make sure someone gives you the home phone number of the director of whichever car company you happen to be driving at the time. If not, just buy normal tyres and fit a full-size spare.
It's one more reason why out-size wheels are all show and no go.
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Two years ago, I had a blow out in the bottom of Spain in a hired Yaris. Firstly, it turned out we had a space saver (not a great solution) but no functioning jack. Plus the hard shoulder of the motorway was approximately three inches wider than the car and had a two-foot drop on one side.
After four hours in the hot sun, the hire company got us towed to a local services to get the wheel changed. It still took us an entire day of our holiday driving around Seville trying to find a garage that stocked a tyre (it is only a Yaris, after all), and then would stay open long enough to fit it. They went for a three-hour sleep half way through doing it. So even small tyres can be an issue in Spain...