tires prone to puncture?

[i3eezy]

Used to puncture my runflats in my 550i all the time, but realized it's mostly because I was driving in median dividers to make left turns, driving through heavy road construction areas, or even last minute lane changes on highways through clear divider spaces. Anywhere where tires don't usually travel and nails or anything sharp can accumulate, you should be very careful. Might lessen the chance of tire puncture.

With the i3, I've avoided making left turns through median dividers, i'm a safer driver in my REX so I'm not making aggressive freeways changes, etc and haven't had an issue. 10k miles so far.

 

[jadnashuanh]

FWIW, with the tires covering less width, you'd miss more nails and crud in the roadway making them less susceptible to being punctured than a much wider performance tire!

 

[HFLagos]

Just posted in main forum about this. Our i3 had a bad puncture recently, hole in side of tyre (wife kindly clipped the kerb). Car was put on truck to be taken home and the recovery guys said they were pretty familiar with recovering the i3 by now. Either someone having an electrical issue or a tyre issue.

BMW dealer wouldn't budge from £223 for a rear tyre, available online from the usual UK tyre retailers for about 50% of that! Had all 4 tyres replaced in the end by Event Tyres as we'd reached 26k miles and I thought it was about time. (Tread depth still adequate though)

So £450'ish all in vs. £850-900 from BMW dealer.......

 

[muddtt]

Less than 5 days old. Fortunately America's Tire patched it for me for free.

.jpg https://www.flickr.com/photos/99160461@N07/

 

[ciendolor]

Four tires in a single year, more than in any other car I've owned. These tires are flaky and useless.

 

[jadnashuanh]

I don't really understand...a nail in the tread will cause any tire to go flat. It's luck of the draw. On one of my older cars, I got two flats in the same day...a bolt in one, and a nail in another on the other side. It's been years since I had a failure. I do not believe it is the tire.

 

[gt1]

I also had a puncture before the car hit 4000 miles. Finally got to use the Stop & Go kit http://amzn.to/2fjlTKI I bought for my motorcycle. It is more expensive than the regular kits with string plugs, but works so much better and cleaner. I was able to complete the repair without taking the wheel off.
One question: I didn't play with the included compressor that much, can it be used just to inflate the tire without the tank with the sealer?

 

[Schnort]

One question: I didn't play with the included compressor that much, can it be used just to inflate the tire without the tank with the sealer?

I thought all I got was a tank with sealer (no compressor).


On a related note, I got a low tire warning on all my tires a few days ago. I assumed it was temperature related, so I went and topped up all the tires. It turns out the caps that came with the car need to be super tight, or they trigger the valve to leak. Or, more accurately, they trigger the valve to leak when they're finger tight, and if you don't really tighten them down, the air will leak out. I didn't notice that and ended up with a flat overnight.

No big deal, but it's an amazingly horrible design. Took the caps off it came with and threw them away and went with plain black ones. I'm not sure if it was the dealer that gave them to me or if it was factory original.

Anyways, I thought I'd share.

 

[jadnashuanh]

The primary seal is actually the cap - the air valve is the secondary one. Cheap caps do not have an o-ring or other very flexible gasket in them, so they need to be tight. I've not had that problem with my OEM ones. What you do not want on any tire stem with TPMS (metal) valve stems is to use a metal cap, but not all caps have a good gasket in them, or it could have some dirt or other debris on them, which can affect their ability to seal. A metal cap on a metal stem will often corrode, and you can't get it off, or if you do, the threads become damaged.

Not all countries use the active TPMS and come with a version that relies on the ABS sensor - a low tire will have a smaller effective diameter because it becomes distorted, and that is what triggers the sensor.

It's a good idea to reset the TPMS once you've adjusted the air pressure to the desired level...it looks for a variation from that, and if that's not set, it won't register properly. I've found that the readout on one of mine is off a little from my digital gauge, but the other three are right on, so I do not believe it is the gauge but is the TPMS.

 

[Masterdungus3000]

I’ve had the car for a year and I’ve had 3. Definitely a design fault somewhere.

 

[Anonymous]

I’ve had the car for a year and I’ve had 3. Definitely a design fault somewhere

... and I've had mine for over two years, and not had even one.

 

[alohart]

I’ve had the car for a year and I’ve had 3. Definitely a design fault somewhere.

The fault is with the number of nails, screws, and other sharp objects that are on many roads, particularly in the U.S. Our 2014 i3 hasn't had a flat tire in 6 years of ownership, probably because the Honolulu roads that I typically drive on don't seem to have much sharp junk on them.

 

[jadnashuanh]

Out of curiosity, front tires or rear? It seems it's more often the rear because if a front one hits something, it can cause it to tumble, and be on end so it can penetrate a rear rather than just going over it if it's flat. Mine's approaching 7-years old and I had one in a rear tire. When I got alerted, I was about a 1/2-mile from a tire store...drove there, and when the tech came out, it had gone flat...had about 20-psi in it when I parked it in that half-mile or so.

 

[labtebo]

https://photos.app.goo.gl/EvtENkwJDakBqQS98
i just bought a spare tire/wheel package from tire rack for peace of mind during flat tire event

 

[labtebo]

https://photos.app.goo.gl/7VQpGpAzPZtWG29T7

looking at an i3 tire/wheel on the car seems the tire looks small. But the i3 tire is a fairly decent tire. See photo of a civic full size spare tire and my newly purchase i3 spare tire. i always upgrade my donut spare tires to full size tires like this civic spare. So i am fairly confident that i could easily fix nail puncture with the dynaplugs which i have been using for the past 10 years on punctures on all my car tires -wherein before i have to visit a tire shop to plug nail punctures.