Tire blowout on the highway: the first two minutes

Do not hit the brakes. Grip the wheel with both hands, keep the car pointed straight, and ease off the accelerator gradually so the car slows itself. Once it is stable and well below highway speed, steer gently off the road.

Braking hard is the instinct and it is the thing that turns a blown tire into a crash. This page explains why, and what to do once you have stopped.

Why braking is the wrong reaction

When a tire bursts, one corner of the car suddenly has far more drag than the other three. The car pulls hard toward that side. Your job for the next few seconds is to stop it rotating.

Braking shifts weight forward and loads the front tires, which makes the imbalance worse and can spin the car. Lifting off the accelerator abruptly does a smaller version of the same thing. NHTSA's guidance is explicit about this: do not overreact, hold the wheel, maintain speed if it is safe to do so, release the accelerator gradually, and steer to correct.

So: both hands on the wheel, steer where you want the car to go rather than reacting to where it is going, and let drag do the slowing. The car will scrub off speed quickly on its own because of the destroyed tire.

A front blowout is felt mostly in the steering, and it pulls hard. A rear blowout is felt in the body of the car, which starts to sway. Both answer to the same technique.

Once you have slowed

Signal, and look for somewhere to stop that is genuinely off the traffic lane. A wide right shoulder, an exit ramp, a rest area. A narrow left shoulder on a busy highway is the worst place to stand and is worth another quarter mile of limping to avoid.

Stop as far from the traffic lane as the shoulder allows, wheels turned away from the road, hazard lights on. Set triangles or flares back up the road if you have them.

Get out on the side away from traffic and stand behind the barrier, up the bank, or well off the shoulder. Not beside the car, not in front of it, and not in the vehicle if the shoulder is narrow. Being struck on the shoulder is the real danger at this point, not the tire.

Then call. If you are on a highway shoulder, that call is to roadside assistance or the state patrol's motorist assistance service, not to us. We are a mobile tire service and we do not do emergency roadside call-out. Getting the car off the highway comes first.

Once the car is somewhere safe

You now have a destroyed tire and probably a spare on the car. Two things need checking.

The wheel. A blowout usually means the tire came off the rim and the rim ran on the road. Look for flat spots, gouges, or a lip that is no longer straight. A damaged wheel will not seal a new tire properly and will leak afterwards.

The other tires. Blowouts are rarely bad luck alone. The usual causes are long-term underinflation, an impact that damaged the casing weeks earlier, age, overloading, or a tread separation that had been building. Whatever did it to one tire has usually had a go at the others. Check pressures against the placard in your door frame and look over the sidewalls for bulges and the tread for bubbles.

If you are driving on the temporary spare, read how far you can drive on a donut spare before you plan the week around it. The limits are shorter than most people assume.

Replacing it

A blown tire is not repairable. There is no version of this where a patch applies.

We come to the car wherever it is now parked, supply a tire matched to the vehicle placard, fit it, balance it, torque the wheel and put the spare away. We do not fit tires bought elsewhere and we do not do alignment, rotation alone or balancing alone.

Whether it is one tire or more depends on the tread left on the others and on the drivetrain, which how many tires do I need works through. Mobile tire replacement cost covers the price side.

What prevents the next one

Pressure, age and inspection, in that order. Correct pressure matters most, because an underinflated tire flexes more, runs hotter and eventually delaminates. Tires also age out of service on time as well as tread depth, which when to replace tires covers.

Questions people ask

• What should I do the moment a tire blows out? Hold the wheel firmly with both hands, keep the car straight, and ease off the accelerator gradually. Do not brake hard and do not jerk the wheel. Let the car slow itself, then steer off the road.
• Why should you not brake during a blowout? Braking shifts weight onto the front tires and worsens the imbalance the blown tire is already creating, which can spin the car. Gradual deceleration keeps the vehicle stable.
• Can a blown-out tire be repaired? No. A blowout destroys the casing. It is always a replacement, and the wheel needs inspecting too because the rim usually ran on the road.
• What causes tire blowouts? Most often underinflation and the heat it creates, an earlier impact that damaged the internal structure, tire age, overloading, or a tread separation that had been developing for some time.
• Is it safe to wait in the car on the shoulder? Usually not. If the shoulder is narrow, get out on the side away from traffic and stand well clear of the vehicle, behind a barrier if there is one.
• Do you come out to a breakdown on the highway? No. We are not an emergency roadside service. Get the vehicle recovered to a safe place first, then we fit the tire at your home or workplace.