The best thing you can do to save some money at least, is to avoid buying from your local tyre center and buy cheap tyres online.
Run Flat Tyre Repair - Safe?
If you buy a brand new BMW or Audi the salesman might have used the Run Flat Tyres (RFT) as a selling point. It has to be said that there are many benefits in running a car on run flat tyres. What they won't tell you is that if you have a small puncture, instead of a £15 or £20 repair bill you could be looking at a bill for £200 to buy a new tyre. The fact is that in the UK at least tyre fitters will not repair a run flat tyre. What makes things worse is if you suffered a puncture with a conventional tyre that could not be repaired the bill could be just half that at £100. So you're paying almost twice as much for the RFT and if you happen to run over the tiniest of nails you'll need to buy a whole new tyre.
Why can't Run Flat Tyres be repaired?
The reason behind this, given by the tyre manufacturers is to do with the thickness of the RFT sidewalls. With a conventional tyre when a technician carries out a puncture repair, one of the first things they will do is to check the tyre for damage, especially damage to the sidewall. This damage is easy to spot as it shows up as creases in the sidewall when the tyre is deflated. With the RFT it is impossible to say for sure if the sidewall has been damaged as the sidewall is so much thicker. Therefore they have no option but to replace the tyre.
What about a slow puncture?
The damage to the sidewall could occur if you continued to drive on the flat tyre for more than the recommended distance (approx. 100 miles) or over the maximum speed of 50 mph. However what if you'd not driven the tyre at zero pressure, what if the car had been sat on your driveway for a few days and happened to deflate as a result of a slow puncture. Surely this tyre would be repairable? Despite there being no damage to the sidewall you won't find anyone that will repair this RFT tyre, the fact is they only have your word that the tyre had not been driven on at zero pressure and they could run into liability problems if the repaired tyre failed.
Verdict on run flat tyres
So are Run Flat Tyres safe to repair? In theory yes they are, as long as they are not driven on. However as cars running on RFT don't have a spare wheel, unless the tyre went down whilst the vehicle was parked, this would be impractical. In practice you won't find anyone that will repair a RFT because both legally and financially it doesn't make sense for tyre centers to repair Run Flat Tyres.
So what about the future, will tyre manufacturers create a machine to check Run Flat Tyres for damage before repair? I wouldn't hold your breath on that one!
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