Steve Mazor was driving home from Burbank on the Santa Ana Freeway three weeks ago when the right-rear tire on his company car blew out at 70 mph.
He backed off the gas, made his way from the fast lane to the right shoulder while decelerating and gently braked to a stop--the proper procedure to follow to avoid loss of control when a tire suddenly loses pressure.
Mazor--chief automotive engineer for the Automobile Club of Southern California--has had a bit of practice at it.
Less than a month earlier, the left-front tire on the same car blew out as it bumped over a Botts dot lane marker as Mazor drove in the fast lane on the Glendale Freeway.
In both cases, the tires were nearly new, mid-priced brand-name replacements for the original-equipment rubber. There was no apparent reason for either blowout.
The car Mazor was driving, a 1981 Toyota Cressida with more than 120,000 miles on the odometer, is serviced at the Auto Club's technical center. The vehicle "is maintained as good as you will ever find a car being maintained, and that includes frequent and regular tire maintenance and inspection," he said.
Still, the tires blew.
"It just happened," Mazor says.
Blowouts, regular flats--even catastrophic tread separations such as those that have plunged Bridgestone/Firestone Inc. and Ford Motor Co. into turmoil recently and made tire safety a topic of dinner-table conversation across the country--do, indeed, just happen with no warning and no identifiable cause.
But many more tire failures are caused by events that car owners and drivers can control, experts say.
And if any public good comes from the Firestone crisis, it's likely to be that it has raised awareness of tires and the importance of regular inspection and proper maintenance.
In the Firestone case, more than 1,000 tires--most of them mounted on Ford sport-utility vehicles and pickup trucks--have disintegrated at high speeds in recent years, leading to several hundred accidents linked to several dozen deaths in the U.S.
Using Your Tires to Read the Road
To really appreciate how important tires are requires an understanding of what they do and how they are constructed.
Simply put, tires are the most critical operating component of a vehicle. Without them, the car or truck--no matter how powerful its engine, how sophisticated its suspension or how luxurious its interior--has to sit, no more useful for transportation than the shade tree in the front yard.
