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Took one of the cars for its MOT today. She passed with flying colours. Driving her home .... I noted a little Corsa. Driven by a young woman (mid 20s or so)

She had a puncture. It was very flat

I flashed the lights at her. She gave me a finger as I am tooting gently and doing all I can to stop her . though how the hell she never noted at 30 mph..

I decide to "go for it" as we approach a layby and managed a "box in alongside her and pointed to the lay-by. She gets out of the car swearing and threaatening to call the police as "



I point at her wheel and ask if she has a spare tyre. Her jaw drops and I got a few




at this point. Fortunately .. she was lucky. I do not think she had driven too far on the "dead flat" tyre (nearside front??) as I could not see any damage on changing the tyre but suggested she took it the the local garage asap all the same.

She then flung her arms around me .. apologised for calling me



.. kissed me and I had the lovely task of explaining to Wildy how come I had pink lippy on my cheeks.

But moral of the tale ./.

she had NO IDEA that the tyre was flat. She looked blank when I asked her how the car felt to drive. She did admit that her car "turned more easily" after I had fixed her tyre though

I think I should put this in "Improve" .. but it's a "safety /legal" issue as well


So now for speculation and debate?

Why the hell can they not "feel" the pull .. poor handling.. of their car? For record I did suggest this girl learned a bit more about her car and its feel .. suggesting IAM .. skid pan fun days and so on.. but she just looked blank and mumbled she already had 6 points on her licence from INGS! so far.

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Hopefully from now on she won't f and blind people who toot at her.

I can usually feel if a tyre is running low (on my main 'runabout' anyway). I've also learnt the 'impulse response' of my car to a sharp, but small, shake of the steering wheel - 'after-wobbles' mean I need to stop and check; I have twice confirmed lacking pressures using this method.

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Views expressed are personal opinions and are not necessarily shared by the Safe Speed campaign

I think half the problem in modern cars is you feel so detached from driving. I once commented that my A4 feels like you're driving the computer that's driving the car, you don't get the feedback through the pedals and steering wheel that you get with my "runabout" N-reg Mondeo.

I had a puncture in the first A4 I owned (2001 Y-reg 1.9 TDI FWD). I knew something was wrong when the ESP light kept flickering whenever I went round a corner. I pulled in at the first layby, checked the tyres... and noticed one was flat.

This is why I think some form of tyre pressure monitoring system should be installed as standard on new cars - all the power assistance on the steering, brakes etc means you don't "feel" in the same way as you do in older cars.

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Magistrates rule #1: "Never let justice get in the way of a conviction."

I have almost the opposite experience to you. I can very easily feel low tyre pressure from how both my (pretty up to date) cars feel to drive. One is EXTREMELY sensitive to tyre pressure being correctly set.

However, they both have TPM but using different systems. One uses tranducers in the wheels and is forever giving false readings while the other has rotational computation software which hardly ever gives false alarms.

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Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

Hmmm.. it's one of the things Jag does well. And why we are excited over that truly gorgeous babe of a Jag in my chattery "wax lyrical" thread. OOOOOHHHH!

Her father's Merc also has similar warning signs and will run on a flat till you get to safety per its blurb in the handbook


Have to admit we prowl around our cars ..checking the tyres each week ourselves and once per fortnight at the local garage.. but that's us. Pedantic to point of paranoid on our cars' health.

But I still feel things through the steering wheel .. and I think this is crucial to road safety.

_________________
If you want to get to heaven - you have to raise a little hell!

Smilies are contagious
They are just like the flu
We use our smilies on YOU today
Now Good Causes are smiling too!

KEEP SMILING
It makes folk wonder just what you REALLY got up to last night!

Smily to penny.. penny to pound
safespeed prospers-smiles all round! !
But the real message? SMILE.. GO ON ! DO IT! and the world will smile with you!
Enjoy life! You only have the one bite at it.

To be fair, she was driving a Corsa, the handling on them isn't exactly great to start with.

It's not unique though, my local garage has a picture up. One of these days I'll get a copy of it. It shows a tyre, still attached to the car, viewed from the front edge of the tyre, ie it should look like a tall black rectangle in the picture, however it doesn't about half way up the entire thing bends and then bends back again, resulting in the top edge being about half an inch further across compared to the bottom.

On the bottom of the picture is the quote "It pulls to the left a little, I think the tracking needs doing"

We spent many hours in the '80's talking about puncture solutions ... Paul came up with a few methods that needed software development ... then Porsche came out with one (that had some issues to start with .. )

The handling of a car seems lost on new drivers. The thought that you can 'feel' the road, and 'learn' things through the steering wheels seems new to far too many people. The handling of one's car seems to be getting forgotten. This goes hand in hand with car balance - helping control of course. So if driver's are not learning this as normal then the tyre feel equally perhaps seems odd or strange or even totally unknown, as in this case.
I find a gentle movement of the wheel - probably like Steve does too - tells you a lot about road and tyre contact. I usually know when I have lost .5 lb of pressure - never mind a flat.
The last I had was very recently ! I was towing the trailer and on the M6 very early hrs of the morning. Felt it slowed and pulled up - got repaired - called into next services to double check nuts (after the few miles) and that the front tyre was still OK. Trafpol saw me and were highly impressed that I had done by myself in 15mins. I was shocked that they were shocked ! Still had a nice chat and he was going to come and check out this site
Towing the trailer has a different effect on the loss of feel when the rear went. The car being RWD tells you v quickly indeed that there is a problem as the rear seems to try to 'steer the car - through your seat' as it were ...
Definitely need much better education. I am a firm believer in images speak a 100 words and animation speaks in volumes Funny public info films become part of our culture and educate and amuse all in one ...

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Part of the problem seems to be that in the quest for increasing comfort and safety, modern cars have lost a lot of the feel and communication that older cars have. I remember it taking me a long time to learn to accept power steering due to the loss of steering feel (I'm not that old, just that my first 4 cars were all sheds that were over 10 years old). When I bought the Legacy I eventually got used to feeling the road through the seat rather than through the steering and that was an acceptable substitute, but many modern cars that I get to drive (usually as hire cars) even this is so heavily damped (in the name "ride quality") that this input is lost as well. Aren't some modern cars now using drive by wire rather than a direct connection to the steering rack, so any remaining feel (that I haven't learned to detect yet) is now completely eliminated.

I did have one puncture in my old non-power-steering Escort that I failed to notice. At the time I was driving on the M53 which was prone to sudden unexpected sidewinds due to it running alongside an estuary, and had pretty much developed an automatic reaction to compensate for this and continue in a straight line, so when my front left tyre went pop and lost all it's air suddenly while I was doing 90mph, I just compensated for the sudden change in direction, then wondered why I'd lost 20mph of speed and couldn't get it back, a moment later and I realised that the car was pulling in the wrong direction for the wind direction, then realised it must be a puncture and pulled over to have a look.

All good fun, a learning experience, my first puncture, I guess I did pretty well to hold it without problem at that speed. I'm sure in a modern car holding it wouldn't be a problem as there would be no sudden change in direction, but at the same time, you don't know that something has happened.