You buy into new tech, you expect certain aspects of your life to change.
Buy a Chevy Bolt, and part of the deal is that you stop saying “gas pedal” for the accelerator. Likewise, “step on the gas” is no longer a valid request.
I guess I should have seen it coming. But I now wonder how long it will be before the phrase “spare tire” goes the way of “cigarette lighter socket”.
Flat tire? Use OnStar
The Chevy Bolt provides absolutely nothing for dealing with a flat tire. It has taken me a while to get my mind around why they did that. And no, I don’t think it’s just to sell OnStar services.
Era 1: Ancient history, the true spare tire.
Standard equipment: Full-service tire and rim, jack, lug wrench.
Back in the day, cars came with five functional rims, and five full-sized tires. One of those was the spare tire. If you had a flat you could drive on your spare more-or-less indefinitely. Because your spare was a real tire.
In most cases, you could use any of the five tires/rims, on front or back, or either side of the car. This, despite whatever folklore you may have absorbed. This, per the standard method for “rotating the tires”, according to the experts at Bridgestone tires, among others. (Directional tires — those that have a forward direction of rotation — are the exception.)
Source: tirerack.com
Era 2: The limited-service, compact, or doughnut spare
Standard equipment: Limited-service tire and rim, jack, lug wrench.
Sometime in the 1980s, car makers began to replace the full-sized spare with a “compact spare”. This was an era when cars were shrinking, gas mileage was at a premium, and competition from foreign manufacturers was intense. Credit for the first compact spare apparently goes to Volkswagen (reference).
Initially the compact spare was the mark of the econo-box, but eventually it became the norm.
Today, there are still plenty of cars that come with a full-sized spare tire standard, but these tend to run to be cars meant to have an “off road” look, as well as some top-end sedans. If you buy your typical mid-size middle-of-the-road vehicle, chances are pretty good it comes with a compact spare.
To be honest, as tires got better over the years, and cars got smaller, I found that the full-sized spare was more of a nuisance than a comfort. Improvements in manufacturing made tire sidewall “blowouts” a thing of the past. Steel-belted radials made it far harder to get a flat by picking up a nail in the tread. And, in general, tires just became a whole lot more reliable. And the full-sized spare ended up just taking up space.
My wife’s 2005 Prius came with a doughnut spare. We sneered at the time, but a) we used it several times so far, b) it works fine for getting the car to the tire shop, and c) little did we know what was coming up next.
Era 3: Tire pump, Fix-a-Flat, and a prayer
Standard equipment: Tire puncture repair kit.
My wife’s 2021 Prius Prime came with no spare at all. Instead, Toyota provides a “tire puncture repair kit” which, as far as I can tell, consists of some tire sealant in a pressurized can, an electric air pump, and directions for use.
Prayer is optional but recommended. And as I am a non-religious person, I tossed in an actual tire plugging kit as backup.
This is now the standard on all Prius models. You don’t even get a doughnut spare, In effect, you get a can of Fix-a-Flat, an electric tire pump that fits that can, and roughly 35-step directions for use. I don’t think we even got a lug wrench or a jack, so there’s literally no way for us to take the tire off the car, unless we buy those tools separately. Edit: Nope, Toyota hid them in an odd spot. So, oddly, the car does come with jack and lug wrench, but no spare tire of any sort. That’s a mixed message, for sure.
(For those unfamiliar with the product, Fix-a-Flat (r) is this pressurized goo that you can squirt into a flat tire, and, if all goes well, and you follow directions, it’ll seal the leak in the tire. At least long enough for you to get to a service station.)
Era 4: The Chevy Bolt: Self-sealing tires and real-time tire pressure monitoring.
Standard equipment: Nada.
The Chevy Bolt takes this to a new low, or new high, depending on your point of view. Like the Prius Prime, the Chevy Bolt gives you no way to remove a wheel from the car. No jack, no tire iron. But in addition, they give you no way to fix a flat, period.
Instead, the car comes with “self-sealing tires”. Bicyclists familiar with the product “Slime” will grasp the concept. In effect, they have pre-installed Fix-a-Flat, with the idea being that the goo already inside the tires it should seal holes up to about an eighth of an inch. It also lets you see the tire pressures in real time, which I think would be handy if you’re trying to get a car with a low tire to a service station.
That’s the theory, anyway. Plus, you are encouraged to subscribe to OnStar. (I still haven’t figured out how to shut up the OnStar lady upon startup, so I just keep the volume on the radio turned off.)
I have of course put a 12 volt tire pump in the trunk of the Bolt. Because, in my experience, “self-sealing” tires are more like slower-leaking tires. It just takes them longer to go flat than if there were no sealant inside the tire. So I do want to carry some way to inflate the tire.
But I’m thinking long and hard about buying a jack and lug wrench for it. Not only is the Bolt a relative dense car — short wheelbase, but weighs more than two tons — it has some weird, non-standard jack points. And Chevy is pretty cagey about just where, exactly, those jack points are, and what will fit.
Crazy as it sounds, to an old guy, Chevy engineers really don’t want the owners to jack up the car, to remove a tire. And for once, I might just go along with the plan.
In any case, for this car, at least, I think I understand the lack of doughnut spare. It’s a small, very heavy car. (As a result, it has a stiff and sometimes uncomfortable suspension, to take all that weight.) There wouldn’t be a lot of wheel travel with a doughnut spare. And I think you’d put your battery down too close to the road to be comfortable.
So, on a Prius, if you hit a pothole with the doughnut spare, you might ding a little sheet metal. With a Bolt, you’ve got some great big battery modules there on the underside of the car. And I suspect Chevy was a little hesitant to put just a doughnut spare between those and the road surface.
Conclusion
Having had cars with a full-sized spare, a doughnut spare, and no spare, I think the doughnut spare hits the global optimum. You really only need something that will give you a few miles of travel, a few times in the life of the car. Just enough to get you home, or to a tire-repair shop. Dedicating a full-sized tire and rim to that task is wasteful, and overkill.
But no spare? I’m not too keen on that. With the Prius Prime, there really is no place to put a doughnut spare. So I guess I’ll accept Toyota’s puncture repair kit as a necessary evil. On the Bolt, I can see why Chevy’s engineers might have wanted to avoid a doughnut spare, owing to a very dense, small car with critical components located in the floor of the vehicle. I’m still not sure why they’ve gone so far out of their way to make it difficult for the Bolt owner to remove a wheel.
In either case — the Prime or the Bolt — I can definitely imagine a situation where I’d want to take the wheel off the car, to get a tire repaired. That’s a lot less stress on the vehicle than towing the car, just to get a nail puncture repaired. And right now, that’s not possible, given what the manufacturer supplies with the car. Not sure what I’m going to do about it.
But this seems to be the trend. Just as my kids thought I was kidding when I called the 12V power outlet under the dash the “cigarette lighter socket”, someday, when an old guy refers to somebody’s fat gut as a spare tire, none of the younger people are going to have the faintest idea what he’s talking about.
Addendum: Notes to self on adding donut spares.
Upon further research, nope, no way I can be comfortable driving a care without a spare tire. Not when I can remedy the situation for a modest expense.
For the 2021 Prius Prime: The car actually does have a jack, just stowed in an odd place (in a compartment under the back seat). By report, the tire puncture repair kit is to be used only as a last resort, as using it will kill the tire pressure sensor and require that to be replaced. By report, the same donut spare fits all regular Prius models from 2004 to 2022. But the 2017 and later models use a larger, 17″ rim, compared to the earlier models with a 16″ rim. Experts say you’re better off getting the proper donut for the vehicle. The Prime still has no place to put a compact spare, and several drivers report tucking it behind a front seat for long trips. But all we need to do is pick up a donut spare from a junkyard, for any standard Prius model in that range of years,.
For the 2020 Bolt, I’ve already ordered a Chevy S10 jack, from a model year that has the right “button” top jack plate to fit the jack points on the Bolt. Rumor has it that a Chevy Cruze (2010-2019, excluding diesels!) donut spare will fit the Bolt, with its odd 5/105 bolt pattern. (The Cruze diesel had slightly larger wheels with a 5/115 bolt pattern). Everyone says that, owing to the radically smaller diameter of the compact spare (compared to the normal wheel and tire), the compact spare should not be used to replace the front tires (but instead, tires should be shuffled as needed so that a compact spare is used on the rear, in the event of a flat). The Bolt actually has a wheel well designed to hold a compact spare, but Chevy blocked off part of it, and a spare will only fit completely if stored deflated.
The upshot is that we’re shopping our local junkyards and/or Ebay for his-‘n’-hers used donut spares, so that when we have a flat, we have some option other than getting towed.
Addendum to Addendum: I bought some donuts.
Last night I bought what I hope are the relevant donut spare tires off Ebay, having already Ebay’ed a jack/lug wrench for a Chevy S10, to fit the Bolt. This was more expensive than scrounging the junkyards, but far less expensive than buying a generic boutique “spare nouveu” off Amazon.
The deciding factors in going with the internet were age and fit. I wanted tires in good shape, because tires degrade over time. (I didn’t want to buy a donut and immediately have to replace the tire.) And for the Prius, the rim fit was fairly important. I only wanted a donut from the latest Prius models, not earlier ones, which means fewer wrecks in the junkyard.
Really, it was like anything else — these days, you get a better selection off the internet than you do in person. You just pay for it. When all was said and done, I figured I had a better chance of success picking among 20 or 30 current offerings for each donut on Ebay, than I did driving out to my nearest you-pick junkyard and managing to find exactly what I was after.
On balance, it’s probably a little bit wasteful to carry around that donut spare, when both manufacturers say you don’t need it. Mostly. But in the end, I realized the internal inconsistency of stocking a car with disaster preparedness supplies (Post #1628), and then not having any functioning spare. So I spent a bit of money to fix that.
Case closed.
