Used Tires are Booming Business

The sale of utilised tires can be a booming sector while in the U.S. that generates substantial earnings margins for suppliers and wholesalers. For shoppers utilised tires can crank out unseen security dangers, although tires have lawful tread depth and look usable. An assessment of your utilized tire small business reveals some unsafe practices-and a company that usually starts off inside of a scrap heap.

Security Exploration & Strategies began looking into the applied tire industry after finding that a significant number of crashes documented in its “aged” tire exploration were purchased utilised. These tires, all six years old or older, were sold to shoppers who believed they were getting tires that were safe, based on their visual condition. Motorists buy utilised tires for a variety of reasons: the low price, for use as a spares, or because owners don’t plan on keeping the vehicle for very long. And they buy them assuming that made use of tires are safe. While many utilised tires are purchased because of tight budgets, individuals across socio-economic strata are lured by one thing-the appearance of a bargain. What they don’t bargain for is the lack of safeguards that allows potentially unsafe utilised tires to make their way back into the market place.

According to the Rubber Manufacturers Association, a tire industry trade group, an estimated 30 million utilized tires are sold to motorists each year. That represents nearly 10 percent with the 318 million new tires sold inside the U.S. annually. Some tire dealers only sell utilized tires. Others sell utilised tires to supplement their sales of new tires. Either way, for the sellers, made use of tires are a lucrative business-garnering much higher gain margins than the sales of new tires. In fact, trade journal articles suggest that utilized tire sales should be part of retailer’s company warning that they are missing a key earnings opportunity if they don’t.

There are several good reasons to avoid applied tires. One is age. Acknowledgement is growing among the industry, researchers and government agencies that aged tires-regardless of their visual appearance and tread depth-can pose a significant threat to protection. The applied tire market place remains an unknown and unregulated source of aged tires. Tires age in a very way that always cannot be detected visually. Oxidation on the internal components causes tires to deteriorate from the inside out. A tire that can seem new on the outside can be compromised internally as the material and chemical properties on the tire have changed significantly, increasing the risk of catastrophic tread / belt separation. Think of those old rubber bands in your desk-when new and fresh they are very elastic, as they age the rubber properties change. Stretching will result in cracking and they break much easier and more quickly then when they were new. Yet, age does not automatically disqualify a tire from the applied tire market place. Often-but not always-used tires are older than new tires and stored, before sale, in conditions that may contribute to rapid deterioration.

The way utilised tires are collected, processed, stored, and selected for sale also raises concerns. More generally than not, the provenance of a applied tire is unknown. Utilized tires enter the sector from many points ranging from tire service center scrap heap to salvage yards to Craigslist. However, the bulk of your utilized tire industry is supported by large multi-state recyclers who do little more than give each tire a visual inspection to determine that tread depth is adequate and wholesale them back into the industry. If a tire has at least 2/32nds of an inch of tread left and no glaring visual defect it’s resold-and frequently cleaned and even painted black to make it seem new. 

According to deposition testimony filed inside of a civil lawsuit, Lakin’s clients include some from the biggest tire sellers while in the U.S: Costco Wholesale, Sears Roebuck, Pep Boys, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company corporate owned stores and Bridgestone/Firestone corporate owned stores. Once the tires are picked up from retailers’ scrap heaps, they are trucked to processing facilities, where they are unloaded onto conveyor belts. There, inspectors, called graders, eyeball 22,000 tires a shift on either side from the belt as they chug along.

The first set of graders, called rough graders, “pull out obvious junk,” says Randall Roth, vice president of Lakin Tire West, the company’s California division. The tires that make the first cut, head for the “skilled graders,” where they can remove a tire, place it tread up on a grading table, and rotate it as they inspect the tire, looking and feeling for separations, cuts, bead damage, sidewall fatigue, lack of tread, uneven tread wear, inner liner defects, punctures and improper repairs. What graders are really looking for are the two most salient characteristics for resale: the popular tire sizes that their retail tire customers want and tires with sufficient tread depth. Lakin CEO Robert Lakin says that the minimum tread depth on a light truck tire would generally be about 25 percent on the tread remaining, or 3- to 4/32nds of an inch. But a utilized tire is not automatically disqualified by advanced age or although it has already been repaired once.

Some tire recyclers will reduce the cost to haul scrap tires if the suppliers provide them with a good percentage of grade-off, thus forgoing traditional and more costly recycling in favor of selling high-profit utilised tires. In other instances, tire shop managers are given direct payments from recyclers based on the level of grade-off they get from their scrap heaps. 

While most utilised tires typically undergo simple visual inspections, others may undergo more processing. Inside the case of Lakin, if the retail client pays for it, or for an extra fee, some employed tires will be sent to a detailing department, where workers will spread the tire for further inspection, inflate it to ensure it retains air, patch it if necessary, and repaint them black. 

At Lakin, about 80 percent of your tires are declared scrap and the rubber is ground up for other uses. The remaining tires deemed suitable for resale are placed in piles until they are shipped to a retail tire center for sale. Lakin sells them in bulk lots, and under the assumption that some bad tires will slip through the grading process, it adds five to seven percent to the order to make up for any tires that are no good. Lakin says it is the tire suppliers responsibility to re-inspect the order to determine if any from the tires are not saleable.

In 1989, former Michelin Tire manager Clarence Ball published a column in a very tire industry trade journal calling for made use of tire standards. He conducted his own casual survey of utilised tires for sale and was sobered by what he found on the racks in his area: “My worst fears were realized when I found a number of tires that looked good - until I examined inside. I doubt that the tire fitter or customer would have spotted loose cords within the tires, evidence that they had been run while under inflated. Several tires had tread repairs which would have caused a number of weights to be applied in an attempt to balance them and also a few had puncture repairs that looked like they had been done by a plumber.” 

Unlike retreaded tires, made use of tires are not subject to any federal standards. Their road-fitness is governed under state tread-depth laws. A recent survey of state requirements for authorized minimum tread depth for passenger vehicle tires while in the United States found that most states require a minimum of 2/32 of an inch (approximately 1.6 mm) of tread. Some states, such as California, the margin of protection is thinner -1/32nd of an inch of tread, while others have no requirements and defer to the federal criterion for commercial vehicle protection inspections. The 2/32 of an inch requirement is consistent with the height with the tread-wear bars built into passenger car tires sold while in the United States, but the robustness and rationality of that measure is far from clear.

In Great Britain, manufacturers of new tires have issued warnings to customers for more than a decade on the dangers of buying what the British call “part worn” tires. The Tyre Industry Council, a trade group, has worked toward promulgating regulations to prevent unsafe tires from reaching the market place. In 1995, the UK implemented a part-worn tire standard that outlined the wear conditions under which a employed tire would not be considered lawful for sale. The TIC has continued to pressure applied tire sellers to maintain those standards. In recent years, the council resumed cautioning motorists about the dangers of utilised tires, after a 2000 survey of employed tires in North Yorkshire found that 40 percent on the tires did not comply with structural basic safety; and 30 percent contained structural defects which could have led to a sudden and rapid loss of tire pressure while on the road.

The scope and magnitude of your made use of tire problem is an unknown because the small business operates with no oversight. Lack of records tracking the tires back to wholesalers-or in many cases even the retailers-is the norm. Individual tires are not tracked by sellers and many made use of tires sales are cash and carry. Federal crash datasets don’t capture critical information on tires like make, model size, and tire ID numbers, let alone whether they were purchased made use of. During the event a tire fails, there are generally no records from the sale and the tire maker whose name is on the sidewall can take the brunt of any liability. And the liability can be significant if there are deaths and injuries. 

Within the U.S., however, the Rubber Manufacturers Association has remained silent on the issue for fear of invoking federal anti-trust regulators. And the Tire Industry Association (TIA), a trade group that represents tire dealers and others while in the tire company, has sidestepped the issue because a large number of their members produce revenues from applied tires. In one TIA member survey, 75 percent of respondents indicated that they sold utilized tires. 

SRS believes that a key solution to removing unsafe utilized tires lies within the use of shearography, a machine that can non-destructively examine the inside of a tire, similar to the way an MRI is utilized in medicine. Large employed tire wholesalers who move millions of tires can afford the shearographic machines that cost $150,000 to $250,000 each. These machines can be automated to scan tires much as they are in new tire plants-rejecting those that show normally invisible internal problems. At least one maker in the shearographic machines claims that this can be done in 25 seconds at a cost of $0.25 per tire. In addition to a visual inspection, a shearographic exam can eliminate the dangers associated with applied tires-and in a very cost effective manner. 

Employed tire sellers, particularly the large wholesalers, should move toward a higher standard of care and adopt meaningful tire inspections that combine visual reviews with internal exams. Tires should be tracked and the accountability should fall on the wholesale and retail sellers. Much like car stores have adopted “certified used” standards the made use of tire wholesalers can adopt a similar protocol for employed tires and provide a useful and safe product they can stand behind. Without self-policing and also a more transparent business enterprise model, utilized tire sellers are courting disaster and the potential ire of state regulators who could examine how to ensure individuals are getting safe tires.