COMMENT: Spare tyres are essential equipment

The lack of spare tyres in many new cars is a dangerous nuisance for Aussie drivers. We deserve better than this.

Is there anything so deflating as a punctured tyre?

It’s not a fun experience – particularly when your car does not have a spare tyre.

Many new models do not have a spare tyre of any kind – not even a skinny temporary “space saver” to get you to a workshop.

Instead, they come with a can of glue-like sealant intended to temporarily patch over punctures from the inside of the tyre, and a small air compressor to reinflate your tyre, if not your mood.

David McCowen with a puncture in the Nissan Z Nismo.

As someone who covers a lot of miles testing cars, I’ve had to use them on at least three occasions in the last five years.

The most recent was just a few days ago, and like a leaking tyre, the repair kit let me down again.

What should have been a lovely Sunday morning getting to know the Nissan Z Nismo sports car quickly became an exercise in frustration after a screw or nail perforated the tyre.

The car’s onboard tyre pressure monitoring system told me there was a problem, so I pulled over somewhere safe and found the rear left Dunlop was indeed flat.

I popped the hatch and lifted its carpet to look for a spare wheel, only to find a round Bose subwoofer in a suspiciously tyre-shaped recess in the boot floor.

What kind of backward priorities are those?

A punctured tyre is not a fun experience.

Teenagers show that sort of decision making. Then again, the folks spending $100,000 on a flash sports car are probably kids at heart.

And that stereo really does bring out the bass in the voice of roadside assistance call centre staff when you’re stranded on the side of the road.

Further inspection uncovered a small repair kit.

Spoiler alert, the kit didn’t quite work as advertised. It plugged the tyre’s hole enough for it to hold some air, but only for a couple of minutes.

Which meant that I had to keep pulling over every few kilometres to reinflate the tyre using a hard-working compressor.

Doing so increased my risk of being hit by a car while working on the flat – a tragedy that claims lives every year. If the car had a space-saver spare, I would have replaced the tyre once and driven safely home to make arrangements to replace the damaged tyre.

Instead, I had to stop five times in 15 kilometres or so to reinflate the rubber.

Flat tyres are particularly painful on 4WDs – then again almost all of them have spare wheels.

To be fair to Nissan, sports cars like this rarely have spare wheels, as they have huge rims with fat, high performance rubber and, in many cases, no boot space to store a full-sized wheel and tyre.

But the main drivers for the elimination of spare tyres are cost and weight.

Car companies can save money by giving you a simple kit that retails for $100 or so, eliminating the need to put a spare wheel, tyre, scissor jack and tool kit in the car. It also reduces weight (which improves fuel economy) and increases storage space.

The kits are becoming increasingly common in new cars.

The American Automobile Association estimates that the number of cars without a spare tyre has increased from 5 per cent in 2006 to about 30 per cent today.

That’s in America, where pick-up trucks such as the Ford F-150 top the sales charts.

British customers prefer smaller cars (and drive shorter distances), which is why the Royal Automobile Club reckons just 3 per cent of models sold in the UK have a spare wheel.

US rubber retailer Tire Rack says the decision to replace 20 kilos worth of spare tyre, jack and tools reaps a 1 per cent improvement in fuel use.

A point against spare tyres? Many people don’t know how to change them.

Given that most journalists need to take their socks off to count to 11, we’ll keep the maths simple.

A family paying $2 per litre for petrol in a car that uses 10L/100km saves about 20 cents out of the $20 cost to drive for 100 kilometres by not having a spare wheel.

That’s $20 per year for folks who drive 10,000 kilometres per year, or $100 over five years.

I reckon that’s a modest saving compared to the massive inconvenience of missing out on a spare wheel.

It’s why all of our new car reviews show whether cars have full-size spare wheel, space-saver or repair kit, and it’s something motorists should keep in mind when choosing their next car.

Originally published as COMMENT: Spare tyres are essential equipment