Comment by kube-system

While you or I, or anyone else who's arguing about tire inflation on the Internet, might be the type of person who can tell just by looking at a 65 series tire whether or not it's inflated correctly -- I don't really think that's the reality of the least-common-denominator driver in the 80s or 90s. Given the number of obviously under inflated tires that I did see back in the 90s, I think it's pretty clear that many drivers either were unable to tell, or didn't bother to look.

> Back in "the day" (so like 80s on down) everyone ran their tires to failure (usually bald, but often blowout as well) as a matter of normal practice, bought used tires left and right and blowouts were pretty common, even more common back in the really old days of tubes. It didn't reliably cause an accident unless you behaved hysterically in response, hence why everyone felt fine doing it.

Yeah, tire technology wasn't great then. And yes, there were people that ran bald tires. But there are still people today that don't care about bald tires. Depends on which side of town you're on. The common way people were measuring tire tread in the 80s, if they cared, was with Lincoln's head on a penny. But also people didn't drive as aggressively as they do now, because 80s cars were slow as shit compared to what people are driving today or even in the 2000s.