16 Jul 07
Nonsense, said BMW when I rang to ask why their tyres were unavailable. They have lots in their network and if I rang my local BMW dealer, he'd be happy to supply. Which indeed Dick Lovett in Bristol would have been delighted to do. Except they quoted £240 plus VAT for the tyre which meant by the time I'd driven to Bristol and back, it would be cheaper to get two brand new tyres from my local man in Monmouth. Which, as I write, is what I plan to do. In the meantime the car remains immobilised outside while I tool around in my wife's decrepit A-Class Merc with its four normal tyres and a big fat spare in the boot.
You'll have spotted that I'm in two minds about this runflat business. On the one hand they're great news for tyre manufacturers because the moment one goes flat, they've just sold another tyre. Lovett's reckon they cost more than conventional tyres and, of course these cars are no longer sold with spares, which means car manufacturers only have to supply four wheels and tyres rather than five with every car. Multiply that by the number of cars BMW makes each year and you'll see the saving is considerable. They also do terrible things to ride quality which is why the only BMWs sold without runflats are those produced by the M division, whose engineers want nothing to do with them until these issues are resolved.
On the other hand many people don't know how to change a tyre and many more would choose not too, and I'd add my name to their number if it was dark and raining. I did it once on the hard shoulder of the M1 while wearing a suit on my way to catch a red-eye out of Luton during a thunderstorm, and if you'd asked me then I'd have said £240 for a runflat was the bargain of the century.
Also, if you get an explosive deflation of a normal tyre - a rare but not unheard-of event - you're going to be in big and possibly insurmountable trouble. It's happened to me once, going around a motorway curve at 85mph, and had I not been driving a car with permanent four-wheel drive at the time I'm not sure I'd have been able to keep on top of it. By contrast I've seen a car wearing runflats being driven over a Stinger at 100mph on a race track, whereupon it blithely continued around the circuit as if nothing had happened. These bloody things clearly save lives.
