Dear LPG,

This one is for the ladies that still drive.  I am sorry for that sexist comment, but I am the son of an 88-year-old mum who really values her freedom and, I suspect, like many other older ladies who drive she is really competent when it comes to the driving but knows little about the workings of the car.

She went out the other day and turned left into a one-way street only to be faced with a cyclist coming straight at her.  She turned quickly to avoid him and managed to curb her car (that means that she got too close to the curb and there was a little bang between her tyre and the corner of the pavement).  She tells me that she did hear a little noise but thought that danger had been averted. 

Now every man knows that the tyre could have suffered but she got about a quarter of a mile down the road before realising that hers was flat.  Luckily, she was near a tyre shop in Catford and they said they would change it for her, but then they asked a question that she has never had to answer before and that was, “I will need to use your locking nut Madam, where do you keep it.”   My mum’s answer was “What is one of those”.

 After a long fruitless search, she learned that you can get a tyre off your car without this all-important commodity, but there is a lot of banging involved and it is quite expensive to replace it.  She has had tyres changed before and told me that it did take a bit longer than usual, but the noise involved even when getting the tyre off legally was deafening. It would be hard to imagine a thief getting a tyre off without someone knowing about it. (I think that this is why they were invented)

So if you have ever wondered why car wheels don’t get stolen quite so often these days and what that funny little thing is in your car.  You now know; take care of it!

 OB, Kent

LPG has found a video showing how to get a wheel off a car without the lock and hopes that it will illustrate OB’s point about the noise involved. We would like to stress that the object of showing it is not to explain how to steal them but to help you understand how long it takes and how noisy and expensive it can be. 

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