Driving into Manhattan Saturday for a film festival, one of our tires blew out. I heard a strange Pfwsssht! noise as we made the transition from Lincoln Tunnel traffic to general Manhattan traffic, loud and peculiar enough to make me ask “What was that?†but it wasn’t until we’d gone another mile or so before Eileene complained of bad handling and we pulled over to discover the flat. Perversely, we were enduring a terrible storm that day, enough to knock trees down all over Montclair.
Apart from the weather, though no problem, right? We were in town comfortably early, and I know how to fix a flat; takes fifteen or twenty minutes. (Plus several minutes of confusion trying to find the spare hidden beneath a panel that made it seem in my distraction that we had an empty well where the wheel should be.) We had a spare; we had a jack; we had a tire iron.
But there was a problem. I couldn’t remove the nuts on the wheel no matter how I strained. Now, I realize I’m not the image of Schwarzenegger, but neither am I a girly-man, and I couldn’t get a single nut to budge, much less all five. We had to call AAA. The guy who showed up was definitely no girly-man, and he had to employ an over-sized tire iron. I blame the pneumatic wrenches used to attach the nuts in the first place. The owner’s manual cautions that the bolts should be tightened professionally with just such a tool as soon as possible, as mere human tightening may allow the nuts to work loose. And safety’s great. Safety is just what we want in a car., But…if you can’t replace the tire without special equipment not in the car, what’s the point of including a spare in the first place?
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