When And How Tires Cause Accidents

Have you ever driven on the road, and seen a large, black object sitting there in the middle of the roadway? You wonder what it is, until you get closer and realize it’s part of a tire.

Only One Driver is Needed

For every tire part you see laying about the highway, there is, in many of those cases, an accident that accompanied that tire piece. That’s because tires play a large part in road safety, and in the cause of car and truck accidents.

Tire accidents are unique because there can be a negligent driver, who doesn’t take care of his or her tires, and allows them to deteriorate, causing an accident—but tire failure cases also can involve only one vehicle, where the tires fail on that car.

Tire Maintenance

When tires cause accidents, it can initially be difficult to pinpoint the reason why a tire fails. Of course, tires do need routine maintenance, so often, if a tire failure causes an accident, the other side will try to blame the person whose tires failed, for the accident, for failing to maintain the tires.

When tires fail, often, attorneys will look to see if a tire is or was defective. Of course, this is yet another reason why it’s so important to get to an attorney after an accident—you don’t want your tires (or what’s left of them) being thrown away or destroyed, before an expert can review them.

Tires are often recalled, but many people don’t do anything about a published recall. You can check online to see if your tires have been recalled, but when someone else’s tires malfunction and cause an accident that injures you, one of the first things an injury attorney will do is get the make and manufacturer of the other vehicle’s tires, and see if they have been recalled.

Even if everything is structurally OK with a tire, external factors can also lead otherwise good tires to fail. For example, tires need to be inflated based on the temperature outside; drastic temperature changes like summer and winter weather changes, may call for differing inflations.

Manufacturing Problems

A lot of failures can happen during the manufacturing of a tire, failures that can lead to defects that lead to accidents.

The rubber in your tire has to be attached to the actual wheel. If there is a problem with the rubber or the quality of the rubber, or the quality of the adhesives that stick the rubber to the wheel, a tire can malfunction.

Wheel Problems

If the problem is with the actual wheel of the car, the rubber of the tire may not stick to the wheel either. This often happens when someone bumps their car into something—say, a curb—and does nothing, not realizing that the wheel has been subtly bent in a way that makes the rubber of the tire come off, or makes it less stable.

Did a bad or malfunctioning tire cause your car accident? Contact our Rhode Island injury lawyers at Robert E. Craven & Associates at 401-453-2700 for help.

Sources:

nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/documents/2019_recall_annual_count_final-021121.pdf4

star-telegram.com/news/state/texas/article286835440.html