Spare tire for ID.4
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I’m sure you’re able to reason that you would be sacrificing some cargo volume to do so. Not to mention the added weight ... well, I guess I just did. 
With ever more congested highways it's just not safe to change a tire roadside these days anyway. A call to AAA is a wiser choice, and this from someone who changed a tire for my mother at age 12.
With ever more congested highways it's just not safe to change a tire roadside these days anyway. A call to AAA is a wiser choice, and this from someone who changed a tire for my mother at age 12.
I think weight saving are really beneficial. But I did have to change tires due to nails on the road before and was happy I had a spare. Any idea how well the fix-a-flat works?
Certainly if you're in a more rural area, not well served by AAA or cell service, or traverse long distances across same (southwest comes to mind) it's comforting to have a spare aboard. But again at the expense of less cargo space and dead weight hauling (albeit not so much for a donut, but every bit counts).
Fix-a-flat generally works reasonably well but is certainly a compromise compared to a spare. The 'goop' needs to be cleaned out for the tire to be repaired and wreaks havoc with stem-type tire pressure monitor sensors. Fix-a-flat is of course useless for a significant puncture, especially sidewall, which can't be goop-sealed.
I haven't had to change a tire in many years. But just a factor of my own environment and perhaps some luck (there's always a contractor's lag screw out there ....). Consider your own history and current travel areas and address as you feel best.
Related: A dozen or so years ago I had a Mazda RX-8 and with it my first pump/goop system. At a point, for some unknown reason, I got nervous not having a spare. So I bought their optional donut and mounting bracket. But I thereafter had to remove it every time to get my golf bag inside. So fairly quickly it just sat full time in the garage and in retrospect was a waste of money.
Fix-a-flat generally works reasonably well but is certainly a compromise compared to a spare. The 'goop' needs to be cleaned out for the tire to be repaired and wreaks havoc with stem-type tire pressure monitor sensors. Fix-a-flat is of course useless for a significant puncture, especially sidewall, which can't be goop-sealed.
I haven't had to change a tire in many years. But just a factor of my own environment and perhaps some luck (there's always a contractor's lag screw out there ....). Consider your own history and current travel areas and address as you feel best.
Related: A dozen or so years ago I had a Mazda RX-8 and with it my first pump/goop system. At a point, for some unknown reason, I got nervous not having a spare. So I bought their optional donut and mounting bracket. But I thereafter had to remove it every time to get my golf bag inside. So fairly quickly it just sat full time in the garage and in retrospect was a waste of money.
As far as I am concerned if a car does not have a spare tire, no matter the reason, it is not properly equipped and therefore not going to be purchase by me.
Sorry then that you won't be procuring the ID.4 and presume therefore won't be further posting here. We all have our feature/criteria hot buttons for vehicle purchases or not so I do understand, even if I don't empathize in this case.
Thanks for the response. My flat tire experience was a rapid failure at high speed , so the tire was not repairable. It was about midnight on a Saturday night during Christmas week in NJ. Temperature was well below freezing, 16F is my recollection. I put on the donut and got home. I don’t think any of the solutions that remove the spare tire would have handled my situation, hence my hot button. Just saying.
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I don’t think any EV has one ? My volt and model 3 don’t have one. But some carry a DIY spare wheel kit if needed.
I understand the concern, but I think the spare tire is the last vestige of an earlier era.
When I was a kid, our family car always had a box in the back with spare parts: belts, points & plugs, coolant, a couple quarts of oil, etc. And they got used regularly (as did the spare). Our vacations often involved multiple full days of driving and I can't recall a single one in which something didn't go wrong with the car. Three days stuck in Paducah waiting for parts. Another three in Portland. Four in Vegas (my parents always talked about that one like it was their own little slice of hell - stuck in a Vegas motel room with four underage kids and no car - and 104° daytime temps). Before my time, both my parents and grandparents had stories of having to buy a replacement car in the middle of a trip when their old car died. Fun times. And as for tires specifically, thanks to the Firestone 500 debacle we once had 6 flat tires on a single trip, all of which were un-patchable. Another time, we ran over a board in the road that apparently had a nail in it. The front right tire, rear right tire, and right tire on our trailer were all flat. The spare didn't do us much good for that one. Even during more normal driving, it wasn't unreasonable to expect about one flat tire a year.
Thankfully, those days are gone. It's not that things don't go wrong anymore, it's just that they're so much less likely that it isn't worth it to haul around spare parts. A few years back, we drove 8,500 miles across the country and back in our Jetta Sportwagen without a single mechanical issue or flat tire. And in the last 25 years, I've had just three tire issues, two of which were such slow leaks that I was able to add a little air and drive on them to get them patched. The third was a bigger deal, but even it was a perfect candidate for a can of fix-a-flat. Again, it's not that flat tires never happen, it's just that they don't happen appreciably more often than any other automotive failure these days. We don't carry around spare parts for any of those other failures, so why carry around a tire?
When I was a kid, our family car always had a box in the back with spare parts: belts, points & plugs, coolant, a couple quarts of oil, etc. And they got used regularly (as did the spare). Our vacations often involved multiple full days of driving and I can't recall a single one in which something didn't go wrong with the car. Three days stuck in Paducah waiting for parts. Another three in Portland. Four in Vegas (my parents always talked about that one like it was their own little slice of hell - stuck in a Vegas motel room with four underage kids and no car - and 104° daytime temps). Before my time, both my parents and grandparents had stories of having to buy a replacement car in the middle of a trip when their old car died. Fun times. And as for tires specifically, thanks to the Firestone 500 debacle we once had 6 flat tires on a single trip, all of which were un-patchable. Another time, we ran over a board in the road that apparently had a nail in it. The front right tire, rear right tire, and right tire on our trailer were all flat. The spare didn't do us much good for that one. Even during more normal driving, it wasn't unreasonable to expect about one flat tire a year.
Thankfully, those days are gone. It's not that things don't go wrong anymore, it's just that they're so much less likely that it isn't worth it to haul around spare parts. A few years back, we drove 8,500 miles across the country and back in our Jetta Sportwagen without a single mechanical issue or flat tire. And in the last 25 years, I've had just three tire issues, two of which were such slow leaks that I was able to add a little air and drive on them to get them patched. The third was a bigger deal, but even it was a perfect candidate for a can of fix-a-flat. Again, it's not that flat tires never happen, it's just that they don't happen appreciably more often than any other automotive failure these days. We don't carry around spare parts for any of those other failures, so why carry around a tire?
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I would be much more comfortable with a spare, but I agree that spares are becoming rarer every year. I didn't have one in my 2010 RAV4 Sport and now I don't have one in my Miata or my Acura MDX. I'd recommend to periodically check your run flat kit and have AAA.
2022 Pro S AWD - Moonstone/Luna, Reserved 4/15/22 Not Locked
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40 Posts
If you are really worried then buy a used donut tire from any of the following vehicle types (5x112 pattern): VW, Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Bentley, Porsche, and many more...
Add a jack and wrench then live with the space loss...
Sorry I don't have pictures, but there are other posts here that do have a simple solution with pictures, I followed those. I picked up a new Audi A8 spare donut on eBay, added a jack and the necessary tools. All for under $200. I have it in the back and it only raises the trunk floor ~1.5" I don't feel I lost any real meaningful space. I have a long commute and put quite a few miles on my car, I felt having a real spare was crucial for me. Others may feel it is not necessary.
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Wouldn't there be a way to somehow fix the wheel upright against the side of the trunk.
Maybe a new project for our 3D print guy.
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