I used to assume that if you drove a car with flat tyres, that you would either feel or hear it, that was my logic. Now I'm not so sure, let me tell you why.

A couple of days ago, I was out walking my dog when I heard what I thought was a car with a flat tyre. I was right. In fact, the Toyota had two flat tyres on the driver's side. It was very loud, but as I watched the driver, he seemed oblivious and he certainly wasn't struggling to steer his car. I continued walking my dog. A few hours later though, I saw the same car, on the same flat tyres, but by this point the tyres were shredded. Yet the same driver was still oblivious and had no visible issues controlling his car.

My initial response on both occasions was some version of "I can hear your tyres are flat, why can't you?", but then I started to ponder.

A few years ago, whilst driving along the motorway, my steering started to feel off, imprecise in someway. I didn't know I had a flat tyre, I just knew something didn't feel right, but spoiler alert, I had a flat tyre. Contrary to popular belief, my car didn't go off the road, I didn't crash, burn and die in some fireball. I came off the motorway, stopped somewhere safe and only when I had stopped did I realise my tyre was flat.

This is probably not the best admission from someone in my case, but for me it raises the question at what point do we as driver's realise we have a flat tyre? In some cases, evidently we don't, we seem to need some additional information before we make the connection.

From my pondering, one question kept coming back to me. Are we as driver's so numb to how our cars feel when they're operating normally compared to when they're not, or has vehicle technology become so good that we cannot really feel incidences like this unless we're in extreme driving scenarios. I assume it's a little of both, but I would be equally interested to hear what you think?

For me personally, it reminds me of two things. The first is the need to truly make every attempt to remove any bias when investigating collisions, something I try but admittedly sometimes something I fail at because in this case it would certainly seem logical that the driver knew they had two flat tyres. The second is that just because something is logical (in this case, the driver must have known), logic is not always true and we cannot support investigations with logic alone.

I'd love to hear about any experiences you have had with flat tyres and what caused you to notice them, if you noticed them at all.

I've added some Nextbase dashcam footage below showing the car. The screenshots above were taken from that footage and have had their brightness increased to try and show the tyres and how bad they really were. The images do not it justice, because the tyres were very bad.