rt4563

So I'm driving along at about 70, enjoying a beautiful sunny day, when my TL starts pulling to the left. "Dang," I think, "Did my alignment suddenly go out or something?" Next I hear thud, thud, thud. I looked in the right side mirror and saw pieces of rubber flying. Finally it dawns on me what's going on. Not just a flat tire, but a blowout. Nice.

My car is a 2005 TL with stock tires and rims. I had just recently purchased the TL with about 19,600 miles on it. I was in a smallish town at the time of the blowout where pickups and big American sedans are the order of the day so I considered myself lucky that the only tire store in town had any tires at all to fit the TL. Some weird brand I've never heard of, but I suppose it was better than spending several days in Ukiah CA waiting for something decent to be special ordered.

Amazingly, there wasn't any damage to the rim, even though the car came to rest right on it. The black stuff you see in the picture is just rubber dust, not scuffing or damage. The remains of the tire is exactly where it came to rest. I opened my door and there it was. A perfect circle, just the tread, no sidewall whatsoever. Most of the inside sidewall was left on the rim and I think that what kept the rim off the pavement while I made my cross-lane trip to the side of the road.

Anybody else had a similar experience with the stock TL tires?

My sig says "bone stock" but I guess that's not true any more, now is it? No jazzy tires for me at the moment anyway.

Let's see if I can manage to upload my pics.

A_UFO

Since you bought the car used, what brand of tires are on the car?

The Navi TL models come with Michelin Pilot HX MXM4 in OEM size of 235/45WR17

csmeance

my navi came with falkentires. BTW did you have the turanza's?

KADAW

wow thats crazy

TheNip73

man, I'd hate to have that happen. Was the car even able to be controled after the blowout? I always worried if I got a blowout the car would just want to do it's own thing.

rt4563

My TL is non-navi and it had the Bridgestone Turanza EL42 tires, size 235/45W R17 All-Season. I'm almost postive they were the original equipment. They're gone now! Since I was in a bit of a "pickle" I had no choice but to replace them with whatever the tire shop had. I was glad that they had anything that would fit, since I was in the land of great big farming trucks and the nearest Acura dealer was a couple of hundred miles away.

I ended up with the Les Schwab Tire Center performance tire brand "Zexius" (i.e. their house brand) in size 235/45ZR-17, model XI-236. The most important thing was that there was no apparent damage to the stock rims. I ended up driving 1,000 miles over the course of the next 5 days with absolutely no problems.

The TL handled remarkably well, given the circumstances. In fact, it took me a moment to figure out what was happening. I didn't really even know until I saw bits of rubber in my rear view. The handling of the car was nearly flawless and enabled me to get to the side of the road quite safely. I had no idea of the extent of the problem until I opened the driver's side door and was greeted by a steaming heap of tire tread.


Is there a history of failures of the Turanza tires? If anyone has knowledge of this, I'd sure appreciate any background.

subinf

i had my turanzas blow out around 20k. was driving to work and saw a bunch of smoke coming off the rear tire. replaced all 4 tires the next day