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Will saving a few dollars cost your family’s life?

11 News Investigates found that buying used tires to cut expenses could have a deadly payoff.

A lot of times they look new, the tread looks deep enough, and so you buy them. But experts say what you can’t see about used tires may be putting your life in danger.

For many consumers it comes down to this: “Tires are round and black, we don’t want to spend money on them,” Sean Kane said.

Which is why car owners often choose the used tire route.

“It’s got adequate tread depth on it, it looks fine, why wouldn’t they use it,” Kane, of the Safety Research and Strategies, said.

But auto safety experts say that is where the rubber really meets the road.

“With tires, looks can be very deceiving,” Kane said.

And the road can end with a memorial of a life that was taken too soon.

“The truck started shaking a lot, the tire was ripping apart,” Ruben Balli said. “And I said, ‘oh man, it’s going to roll.’”

Balli’s wife was in the passenger’s seat when  their truck rolled three times.

“I was married 48 years, and you can’t forget that,” he said.

The truck had a used set of tires that Balli bought at a mom and pop shop, tires with plenty of tread that appeared to look good.

“I learned the hard way,” he said. “I mean the hard way.”

And for his daughter: “There is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about my mother,” Elvita Gonzalez Balli said.

But along with her pain, there is anger about how little consumers are protected when it comes to used tires.

“We don’t know the history, where they come from, where they’ve been, how old they are,” she said.

This family didn’t know those answers either before a tire failure left mom in a wheelchair and their 8-year-old son scarred for life.

“He has a brain injury,” Veronica Avila said. “I think a lot about my son’s future because in school, kids laugh or whatever. It’s hard.”
In their case, it was a used car they bought that came with a used set of tires.

“They seemed okay at the time, but this happened,” Avila said.

What’s happening is millions of used tires are sold every year as part of a booming business, but it’s a business that practically no one is regulating.

And so what’s happening?

“It is exactly do as you please,” attorney Rob Ammons said.

“There really is no way to hold these used tire resellers responsible to consumers when tires fail and lives are destroyed,” he said.

And that’s because nobody tracks where these tires come from.

In most cases, they start at the large retailers who sell off their scrap tires to recyclers. Those recyclers then pick through the scrap and find tires to resell to small shops for a hefty profit.

The only problem?

“You have a simple visual inspection from fairly low paid wage earners just given minimal training,” safety expert Kane said. “And that’s dangerous.

Kane said companies just can’t spot all the unsafe tires.

“The naked eye is not capable of seeing whether there is an internal problem with that tire or not,” he said.

And so Kane is pushing to use a technology similar to what an MRI can do for humans.

It’s called shearography — a laser examination of the inside of the tire, which can look for any gaps between the materials. Those materials begin to crack, crack inside, to a point where the tread can tear catastrophically, according to Kane.

But so far, Kane said no used tire wholesaler does such an examination and in fact, some go to other extremes.

“Even making matters worse, they’re cleaned up to make them look better,” he said.

11 News obtained court testimony from one tire recycler who which admitted it “paints used tires” black as to “make them look like new.”

“You have no idea whether it’s safe, but it sure looks like it’s gonna be,” Kane said.

But on the flip side: “I don’t think it’s deceiving to the consumer,” Dick Gust said.

Gust is with the Tire Industry Association, which represents used tire dealers.

“It simply beautifies it,” he said. “It’s not different than Armor-Alling it to make it look new when you have it on your car.”

Gust also claimed that used tires are examined closely.

“It’s totally inspected several times before it ever goes out to a consumer, and these are keen eyes that are looking at the tires,” he said.

But again, it’s the naked eye doing the inspection.

“You just don’t know what you’re getting,” Dan Mielenski with the Rubber Manufacturers Association said.

And when looks may be deceiving, “It may not be worth the risk to your safety to save a few bucks,” Mielenski said.

So why isn’t there any government regulation of this industry?  Safety experts told 11 News Investigates that a powerful used tire lobby has fought hard against it.

And another thing working against consumers: There’s not a quick way to know when a tire was made.

Instead of stamping on an easy-to-read born-on date, tire makers put a long string of numbers on the sidewall that are basically in code.