Weird blown tire

[ford]

Well, I think it’s weird.

wife was picking up her brother and her rear tire blew. Luckily they pulled over safely and put on a spare.

the pattern seems so uniform. Any tea leaves / tire readers that can tell me what failed?

[Cdn_Cuda]

How old is the tire? Seems like a pretty catastrophic failure! Not enough air pressure in the tire maybe and as the wheel turns it crushes the sidewall?

[tyronejk]

I haven't seen a tire fail with tears going out radially from the center, but I've seen tires fail uniformly around the rim when they're driven on too low pressure and fatigue the steel carcass. That's the only failure mode I can think of that would result in something like this.

[RAZRBAKK]

That is such a weird, uniform break. It makes me wonder if she hit something or just drove it for a few clicks with it down. Can't see the manufacturer date, so maybe age of rubber. Those holes look PUNCHED into it.

[Trbo323]

I've seen that plenty. I'm a trucker. It's a sidewall failure. Since a lot of our tires are retreads the sidewalk gets weak. The two most common things I see when a tire completely fails are sidewall blowouts like this and thrown treads.

It doesn't have to be a weak sidewall to do this. I had a brand new tire put on and 80 miles later I was backing into my parking spot and it failed in the same way

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[Kit]

Tire was manufactured on the 1219. 12th week of 2019. I'm no tire expert but my guess would be rolling on low tire pressure.

[ford]

How old is the tire?

Just double checked, it's 12/19 So just about 4 years old.

Not enough air pressure in the tire maybe

In general I am a stickler about tire pressure. I keep an air pump in her car just in case. She's got sensors too to say when the tire pressure was low... Though, she does sometimes ignore them -_-;;

It makes me wonder if she hit something or just drove it for a few clicks with it down

There was a lot of construction going on around this area. She was also going at highway speed when it blew so I wonder about those clicks...

I've checked the tread itself and cannot find any puncture/hole anywhere except the sidewall. Glad I'm not the only one surprised by it.

I've seen that plenty. I'm a trucker. It's a sidewall failure. Since a lot of our tires are retreads the sidewalk gets weak. The two most common things I see when a tire completely fails are sidewall blowouts like this and thrown treads.

Thanks for the info!

[Mr. Hick]

One part of the sidewall failed causing the tire to flat. Driving it at a high rate of speed until coming to a stop caused the rest of the sidewall to fail even harder, daddy. I have seen this a bunch in modern lower profile tires.

[Trbo323]

Mostly speculation here but worth considering,

A lot of times the treads of the tires are stronger than the sidewalls so what I think happens is at some point the sidewall takes a bend, usually from the tire hitting something. A curb let's say, and that bend spot is now the weakest point. As the tire goes round and round it continually weakens that spot which transfers the load to other spots around the sidewall so when the weak spot finally gives out, the transferred load and air escaping also rips other holes

On a semi tire the effect is about 10 times worse. It often looks like spaghetti noodles are what make up the sidewall. But not surprising considering it's roughly 3x the internal volume at 100psi. I've had trailer tires blow on me like this and the effect sounds like someone fired a shotgun right behind the cab of the truck

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[JeeperCreeper]

Seems pretty typical for a blowout. Think of how many times that rotated before it came to a stop. Have you ever watched footage of a car getting spike stripped? The tires usually shred and fall off very quickly with the weight of the car being forced onto the bead of the wheels, right onto those sidewalls. Now if 2 or 3 of your tires looked like that, then I would call shenanigans.

Also the tire pressure monitoring sensors dont always work immediately, they can take anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes to respond. If youre traveling at 50mph, a few seconds could be a couple hundred feet you traveled on a tire that was losing pressure.