It should be illegal to sell cars without spare tires

[Acer]

I rotate my own tires sometimes, and use a torque wrench to set the torque per the manual. I certainly can tell when the mechanic was the last to pull the tire. Properly torqued they come off with just leaning in a bit. Mechanic-torqued and I nearly blow a blood vessel to break it.

[M A V I C]

Bernie wrote:
So who here has changed a tire with the silly A$$ lug wrench provided.

Talk about cardio.

Go ahead and try to break one of those lug nuts loose next time you wash your car.

Call someone.

Take the rod from the scissor Jack and stick it in the end of the wrench. It'll just about double the lever length.

[Thrift Store Scott]

M A V I C wrote:
[quote=Bernie]
So who here has changed a tire with the silly A$$ lug wrench provided.

Talk about cardio.

Go ahead and try to break one of those lug nuts loose next time you wash your car.

Call someone.

Take the rod from the scissor Jack and stick it in the end of the wrench. It'll just about double the lever length.
That would no doubt work, but only in the relatively few instances where the wrench is hollow and the rod from the jack will fit inside of the wrench handle.

Easier by far to buy an inexpensive breaker bar and a 6-point socket to fit your lug nuts from Autozone, Advance, etc. and keep those in the car. With the socket attached to the breaker bar and aligned straight with it, that'll take up no more room than a golf club handle without a head and will save a lot of swear words, busted knuckles, and stripped lug nuts if it's ever needed.

Back to the topic at hand, it should indeed be illegal to sell cars in the US without spare tires. BMW was the first company I'm aware of to stop including spare tires even though their cars still include a place to put a spare, but I'm sure they thought this would be fine because in Germany how far away from civilization can you get and at worst, how bad would it be if you had to spend the night in your car there? I'm a big believer in letting the punishment fit the crime, so I say let the German engineers who approved this idea have a flat somewhere out in the wide open spaces of the Southwestern US where both the distances and weather test the endurance of anything. Run-Flat tires are only rated to go so far once they're flat, about 50 miles I think, and it would be interesting see how quickly those engineers see the error of their ways while stuck in some desolate part of Arizona or New Mexico because their run-flat tire disintegrated after 50 miles of highway speeds in 110 degree weather and they have no spare.