Last Updated on November 24, 2020 by Dave Farquhar
I bought tires last week. The last time I bought tires, I bought road hazard insurance without even thinking about it. This time I thought about it, and asked “How much?”
It was $130 and change.
I did some very quick math in my head, and said no, rather emphatically. Maybe too emphatically.
Here’s the math. I last bought tires four or five years ago. On my car, I’ve needed the road hazard coverage once. Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t in position to use the coverage, so I paid someplace else $20 to patch the tire.
But it only happened once. And my average for the last 19 years has been roughly one flat tire every 4-5 years. That happens to be about how long a set of tires usually lasts for me. So the last time I bought tires, I spent $130 to save $20, and then I didn’t even save the $20.
So what if the tire is damaged to the point of needing to be replaced? Well, that’s actually happened on my wife’s car. But when it happens, they don’t just give you a new tire. They look at how much tread is left, then give you a pro-rated discount on a new tire. So when we had to use the road hazard coverage on my wife’s car, what we got was about a 25% discount on some no-name tire because they didn’t even have a matching tire in stock.
For some reason, my wife’s had a run of bad luck the last few years, and she’s actually had four flats, two where the tire couldn’t be repaired. But one happened far from the store, so we couldn’t use it. Had we been in position to actually use all of the coverage I paid for, we still would have only saved about $80.
So I opted not to spend $130 for questionable protection of my $330 set of tires. If road hazard coverage is included with the purchase price and the purchase price is competitive, there’s no reason not to take it. But there’s no reason to pay $30+ per tire for it.
A smarter use of that money is to pay to fix flats as they happen, and consider getting an extra rim and a fifth tire to use as a full-sized spare, and rotate it in. Then, in the event of a tire issue, you don’t necessarily have to drop everything and take care of it right then. Put on the spare, get where you need to go, then when you’re in position to shop around, weigh your options and get the flat taken care of.
And since your tires will last about 25% longer by virtue of one tire being out of the rotation 25% of the time, the full-sized spare comes close to paying for itself anyway just in a matter of dollars, not even factoring convenience in.
If a tire is damaged to the point of needing replacement, replace it. Use the money left over from not buying the coverage. Match the tire if at all possible, and if that’s not possible, replace the other tire on the same axle.
Or the other thing I could do is just deposit that $130 into the bank account I use for emergencies, because chances are, I’m not going to spend $130 on emergency tire maintenance. But I spend enough time on the road that buying a rim and another tire seems prudent.
And one more thing; Keep the tires properly inflated. It saves you some hassle and improves gas mileage. What’s not to like?
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.
I agree all the way down to where you begin to talk about getting a different tire, whether less expensive or not. Having different makes, models, treads, tread compounds, etc. on the same vehicle seriously affects the handling of the vehicle when pushed or in an emergency avoidance situation. If you must use different tires then at least have the same size and model on both ends of the axle. I learned this from experience as well as research, fortunately it was not a sad experience.
So if a tire store can’t match the tire, keep shopping?
Since my local tire stores seem to have trouble keeping sufficient stock to match tires at a later date, it makes it sound like buying a fifth tire for a full-size spare is even more important. They’ve just always pushed whatever they had in stock, sometimes without so much as a warning of uneven tread wear if I just bought one.
And I suppose this means the fairly common practice of replacing two tires at a time isn’t a good idea, unless you can get the same make/model of tire?
I would, two at a time on the same axle is cool. I don’t know what the tire stores are like in your area, I’ve used Big-O here in California for many years and they are plentiful enough that there’s always been one close to the places I’ve worked around the state, their good tires are good, and I’ve only had to wait for a day once when I wanted a whole set with a heavier load rating to replace the factory tires I thought were inadequate for my purposes. Specialty tires can be a problem of course, but nothing you have ever posted suggests that you have indulged in that sort of vehicle. And yes, a full-size spare is a good idea – those little things they give us are not good for many miles and can’t be safely driven at speed.
Thanks for the correction and clarification. I’ve edited the original post.