Midweek Link Extravaganza

• When poets attack.

• You know about automated speeding tickets and parking tickets. How about tire tickets? Enter this wondrous new law enforcement tool:

...a camera that scans the tires of passing cars and mails tickets if the depth of the tire tread is deficient by a fraction of an inch.

Which is as good a time as any to report that the tires on my 18-month-old Toyota RAV4 Limited are as bald as the eagle who nests in the trees across my house. The car (and the tires) have just 30,000 miles on them. I'd never heard of modern tires that (properly inflated and rotated) last fewer than 30,000 miles. All the tires I've bought in my dozen years of car ownership have, in fact, had warranties in the 50-60,000-mile ballpark.

When I inquired, the car dealer shrugged and claimed they're really just starter tires. The tire manufacturer, Yokohama, hasn't returned the call I made two weeks ago. Toyota headquarters informed me bluntly that my beef is with the tire maker and refuses to mediate — have a nice day.

Kind of an odd way to treat customers who shelled out $30K for a new vehicle not that long ago. Do other car manufacturers do the same thing — deliberately put limited-life tires on new cars? It'd be one thing if the obviously sub-par tread life of the tires had been disclosed before the sale. But it wasn't, and so I'm looking at a replacement set that'll set me back $500 - $600 at least a year before I should have had to even budget for that purchase.

Demerits all around — to Toyota, Fitzgerald Auto Mall, and Yokohama. It may not be illegal what they do, but it feels pretty damn sleazy.

• With the Guardian, you rarely know whether you're reading a news report or an editorial. Case in point, this blurb on the paper's RSS feed:

'Many Tory MPs still climate sceptics': Poll suggests up to a fifth of all MPs do not understand, or choose to ignore, the science behind global warming

Ah, I get it. When someone like, say, a Guardian journalist is skeptical of something, that's a virtue. When some wretched Tory MPs are skeptical, however, those belligerent obstructionists are just being willfully ignorant and irresponsible. Clear?

• England is battling knife crime again — it's those "feral yoofs" that everyone's afraid of. Among the measures proposed by the Brown government are a 9 p.m. curfew on anyone younger than 17, and, under penalty of liquor-license revocation, requiring pubs to frisk customers for all manner of stabby things. The British people are totally down with that. The London Times reports that

nine out of 10 parents would back legal restrictions on their children going out after dark.

So U.K. parents don't want to actually raise their own kids and tell them in no uncertain terms that late-night West Side Story re-enactments are not acceptable. Disciplining your children? That's what the gov'mint is for, innit?

By the way, the curfew initiative was tried before, and found to be unlawful by a British court just a few years ago. Nothing like stubbornly wasting the courts' time by forcing them to keep revisiting matters of settled jurisprudence. And hey, you never know — one of these days you might actually find a magistrate who thinks nothing of keeping millions of people under house arrest night after night.

• The Newspaper Association of America has a blog called, grandly, "Imagining the Future of Newspapers." Just how future-focused and imaginative are the NAA folks? I'll tell you: the last blog entry dates from May. Nope, no dinosaurs there.

• I feel pretty smart (and now, smug) up here in Maine. You see, it turns out that people with high IQs tend to gravitate to colder climes — or maybe colder regions spur more intellectual development in their inhabitants.

[H]otter environments are less conducive to civilization, at least for Whites, and not just in extreme cases like the failed attempt to colonize sub-Saharan Africa. Civilization may have started in hot areas, but that was then. It apparently flourishes much more in colder climates.

Thought I'd pass that on, courtesy of the Legal Satyricon, who quips, "This might explain Florida."

Comments

[smurfy]

Other Car manufacturers do the same thing with the cheap starter tires. I just replaced my 07 Subaru tires at 11,000 miles.

Get this rook: My wife hit a curb, one tire developed a bubble in the sidewall. I took it to the dealer to purchase 1 replacement tire, the other 3 being brand new in my mind. Dealer informs me that since the other 3 are worn by slightly more than 2/32 of an inch, I cannot replace just one, it will throw the AWD out of balance. OK, I'll take a pair. Nope! I have to replace all 4 or it will void my warranty for any and all AWD parts, oh and BTW, we already have that flagged on your VIN in our computer system so all Subaru Dealers will see it.

At least you and I will stick to the road this winter.

[Martin Owens]

RE: Cold climates lead to higher IQs and attract more civilized people:

I got two words for you.

Cleveland, Ohio.

[hermesten]

Second on Smurfy. I don't normally buy new cars --I buy used-- but my new company car, a Buick, needed new tires at about 20,000 miles.

[martin]

Tread Life isn't Everything

After a few decades in the car repair business I have never heard of "starter tires". I have found that OEM installed tires are quite good. That aside, tire life is an inherent compromise between road holding/handling and tread life. It is further influenced by many hard-to-quantify variables, such as driving style (lots of hard cornering, high speeds), prevalent road surfaces (smooth, rough, potholes, dirt road), climate (lots of direct UV and heat or extreme cold) and by far not least maintenance. The last is the most obvious. How many vehicles have you followed where you could plainly see grossly underinflated tires with bulges like love handles or the vehicle overloaded without increasing tire pressure? How many people check tire pressures regularly? Heck, there isn't even generally available accurate equipment for the task. Especially Americans are incredibly lazy when it comes to tire maintenance. Hence the mandated, expensive tire monitoring systems on newer vehicles.
On to the tread life issue. You can't have grippy tires that last 60000 miles. By necessity long-life tires have to be harder to resist abrasion. Hard tires are most obvious and most dangerous in damp and wet conditions - with often desastrous results. I personally have never understood the focus on high-mileage warranties any more than lifetime warranted brake pads. It's BS, in my book. Further, you get what you pay for. Cheap tires are just that - cheap. Out of round is a problem I have frequently encountered. Performance tires are expensive for a reason, not just because they make everybody more profit. Lastly, what good is a high-mileage tire whose tread lasts 5 years if, two years into its life, it has been battered so much by curbs, potholes, running over rocks and the environment that it becomes an unbalanceable, thumping, vibrating dangerous piece - the only contact between you and the road? Tread life isn't everything.

[Blakenator]

I have bought quite a few new vehicles and my experince is the tires last somewhere between 30-40K with one exception. I bought a Dodge truck and changed out the tires at 105K with about another 5-7K left because my wife was worried about a long trip we were taking. I was closely monitoring them from 40K on. I am convinced the tire company made a mistake with that lot because it hardly fits the pattern. Hermesten makes some valid points but I firmly believe low wear tires is intentional on new cars. Hey, it helps the economy.

[HKL]

The tire monitoring devises were installed more due to liability concerns, than the lazy Americans, although I must agree too many of us have severe brain deficiencies. But the rest of the world certainly doesn't lack their's.

It's been notorious for manufacturers to use cheaper tires, shocks, etc. in new vehicles. It simply saves them costs. We pay the price twice.

[karlt]

You're complaining about getting 30,000 miles out of a set of car tyres? Word of advice- don't buy a motorbike, the tyre life will terrify you!