Dont Do That Why Driving on A Flat Tire Is Dangerous And Could Cause More Damage

Oh, man. Dude, this thing's pulling to the left pretty bad.

Yeah. It's not the road, you don't think it's the road?

I don't think it's the road, usually, the road turns to the right.

Oh, yeah. You are right.

Do you hear that?

I do hear it.

It doesn't sound good.

Sounds like...

I got to pull over.

little floppies over bumps.

I have to know what's going on. Oh, no! Great! Hey, friends. It's Len here from 1A Auto. Has this ever happened to you, you're driving down the road, you can feel a little bit of a pull, and you start hearing like a tah, tah, tah, tah, tah, tah, when you're driving down the road, you look out the window or you hop out of the car, your tire is flat? Unbelievable. When does this ever happen? Never at the most opportune time, whether it's raining, like it is for us today, or maybe you're driving down the side of the highway, and you just don't want to pull over because you feel unsafe. Either way, maybe for some reason, you decide to drive on it for a little while because, well, who cares about that tire, it's flat anyways. Now, why would somebody even drive on a flat tire anyway, it doesn't seem like it's the safest? Well, maybe they have one of these low-profile tires like this. The sidewalls on these are going to be much stiffer than the tires that are on a lot of most economic cars, like this Toyota right here. Now, those walls are a little bit longer. So as the tires flat, it's going to have a whole bunch of extra material to be able to flop around. So, you're going to hear it and you're definitely going to feel it. With this wheel right here, you're probably not going to hear very much, but you'll probably feel it.

Now, luckily for you, getting a flat tire isn't necessarily the end of the world. Is it inconvenient? Yeah, especially if you're on the side of the road, or, of course, dealing with something like this in the rain. But if you catch it soon enough, you might not have caused too much damage to the tire, all you want to do is just go ahead and inspect the tire, see if you can find something that might have caused the leak. On this one right here, I found a screw. If I was to fix this, soon enough, without necessarily driving on it for an extended period of time, typically, I can just get away with using one of these. You have some tire plugs, these are very simple to use. And then, of course, there's a tire patch. Overall, the patch is going to be a better fix for the tire, but it's not necessarily the easiest thing to do on the side of the road because you do have to technically break down the tire. If your tire came off the rim like this, you're never going to be able to re-inflate it on the side of the road, which is probably a good thing.

To fix something like this, we're gonna have to go ahead and take it off of the car. So, we're gonna jack it up, remove this one, and we'll install a spare tire. If you were to have driven on your rim, there's a possibility that you could have damaged it to the point that you might even damage a brand new tire. Looking at this one right here, you can see exactly where it got damaged, it was driving along the road, and, of course, the metal aspect of it, or on this one aluminum got kind of peened over a little bit. If I'm very careful, I can go ahead and skim across this without cutting myself, but under the pressure of the tire on the ground, it could potentially ruin the new tire, like I said before. Now, this rim isn't cracked, chipped, it just kind of has some scuffs coming along it and a little bit of a sharp edge, but nothing really something that I'm super worried about. For this right here, I can go ahead and carefully sand it down so it's a nice smooth edge, going all the way around where it's going to touch up against the tire, and I should be a-okay. But if you did happen to find that your rim was cracked or damaged in a way that you can't really repair it very easily, typically, you're just going to have to replace it.

So, you have a flat tire, you go ahead and you go to the trunk to grab your spare tire, you go to replace that flat tire, put it back down on the ground, your spare tire is flat too, why is that? Nobody ever checks their spare tire tire pressure. So, here's an example of what might happen if you were to try to re-inflate a tire that you drove on while it was flat. Looking at this along the sidewall, you can tell that it has very minor damage on it. It doesn't look like it's very bad, but in all honesty, it can be very dangerous, especially when you're driving down the road. Now, if I was to take a closer look at this, maybe I turned it around, I might see something a little bit different. Yeah. I had the same markings where you can tell that the rim was grinding into the tire, but as you can tell right here, I have a giant bubble coming through here. This means that I broke the belts that are on the inside of the tire, which makes this an extremely unsafe tire. Not just having these lines on here, because having those on there is unsafe as well, but having a bubble like this can put you in a dangerous position. And that's just what's on the outside that I can physically see, now imagine what's on the inside. Looking at this one right here, you can see exactly what happened. As I was driving for a little while, the rim started kind of rubbing into the sidewall quite a bit, and as that was happening, it was taking off a whole bunch of the rubber that's supposed to be located on the inside.

Okay. So, what have we learned here? Driving on a flat tire is going to be unsafe overall. I definitely don't recommend it for any reason. Of course, there are going to be times where you feel as though you're safer driving on a flat tire as opposed to maybe being on the side of a highway. Nobody wants to get out of the car on the side of a highway and try to change a flat tire over to their spare tire. Especially, if you haven't checked that spare tire pressure in a little while, and it turns out to be flat anyways. Sometimes you're gonna have to just drive on that flat tire to get to a safe area. That's understandable. But overall, if you drive on a flat tire, you could potentially cause some serious damage to the tire and it's probably not gonna be reusable. So, if you feel as though you have a slow leak on one of your tires, you're going to want to make sure you get that checked out and fixed ASAP. The last thing you want to be is driving down the road on a flat tire. Okay, friends. I hope you liked the video, I hope you learned a little something. If it's something that you think is interesting, feel free to share it with everybody that you know, I'd appreciate it. If you liked the video, smash on the like button for me, it'd mean the world. While you're at it, go ahead and subscribe, ring the bell, that way there you can be kept up to all of our latest content. I'm getting out of here. Whoo, it's squishy. It's fine. It's totally fine.