The wheel’s o the bus
It’s that time again: puncture!
When was the last time you had a puncture? According to tyre maker Continental, they hit the average European driver once every five years, or 44,000 miles. And since I do around 30,000 a year, I suppose I can’t grumble about falling victim to my second in 18 months.
My last blow-out debacle, driving our long-term-test Skoda Octavia vRS 245, resulted in a fivehour wait in the car for the AA to fetch a new tyre because we didn’t have a spare and the patrolman’s universal spare wouldn’t fit over the 245’s big brake kit. Since then I’ve always opted for a spare wheel whenever possible. And there it was, a black rubbery rescue beacon beaming back at me from beneath the boot carpet.
It started off well. The jack made light work of the Touareg’s 2070kg heft, though to be honest I would have welcomed another one to help hike the mammoth, now redundant, 21-inch alloy up high enough get it into the boot to take home. But the real problem came when I tried to inflate the spare.
It’s one of those collapsible spares that looks flat when stored, like you’ve got a Pirelli P7 from a mid-1970s Countach inexplicably stored under your SUV’s boot floor. To make it useable you need the supplied air compressor. To make that work, you need electricity. But we had none. No power from any of the three on-board 12v sockets. I’d never noticed before because I use the wireless charging tray to juice my phone. I turned the car on and off, tried locking it and restarting it, even dropping it down off the jack in case there was some weird anti-tilt thing going on. Nothing.
So it was another wait for the AA, whose compressor wouldn’t work off the VW’s sockets either, meaning there’s some kind of circuit issue, possibly just a blown fuse. I blame the kids. Probably trying to play hairdryer badminton or something equally daft and fuse-unfriendly. Whatever it is, it needs investigating – I’ve only got another 44k ’til the next one…