Comment by AnthonyMouse
3 months ago
The second one is the better one.
There are some laws prohibiting the sale of used tires with less than a certain amount of tread. In some motorsports you want tires with no tread (slicks). Moreover, they're being used in a different context (a vehicle on a track rather than public roads). But the law prohibits the sale because it takes no account of the context.
> There are some laws prohibiting the sale of used tires with less than a certain amount of tread.
I think you're confused. I'll explain why.
Some contries enforce regulations on what tyres are deemed road-legal, due to requirements on safety and minimum grip. It's also why it's illegal to drive around with bald tyres.
However, said countries also allow the sale of tyres for track and competitive use, as long as they are clearly sold as not road-legal and for competitive use only.
So, no. You can buy track tyres. You just can't expect to drive with them when you're dropping off your kids at school and not get a fine.
Also, it should be noted that some motorsport competition ban or restrict the use of slick tyres.
Now I'll explain why I think you're confused.
Some jurisdictions ban the sale whatsoever of used tires with less than a certain amount of tread. It's not that you can't put them on a car to drive on public roads, it's that no one can sell them to you. They prohibited the sale rather than the use, thereby interfering with the people wanting to make the purchase for a different purpose.
> Some jurisdictions ban the sale whatsoever of used tires with less than a certain amount of tread.
No, not really. This appears to be the source of your confusion. In Europe+US, thread restrictions are enforced on standard road tyres marketed for use in public roads. You can buy slicks if they are marked for track use, but it's illegal to drive around with them.
But feel free to cite exactly what jurisdiction and regulation prevents you from buying tyres. I'm sure you'll eventually stumble upon the source of your confusion once you start to look up your sources.
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No in my locality, angry old karens got together to get the local government to prevent used tyre sales (small fine from memory), and actively damage and break tyres that are being provided to motorsport enthusiasts for free. Actually they were able to create a police task force to damage the tyres for them. They also had a tyre buyback scheme at one point, to make bald tyres unaffordable.
Its a social harassment scheme that has become popular for the local government to buy into and legitimize.
It is already illegal to drive with bald tyres, so the extra regulations and enforcement really only serve to make life difficult for law abiding citizens.
Keep in mind we have 2 local legal motorsport venues that have open track days. And theres a separate police task force that spend their time chasing down our principle hoons, who are public enough that they have an official facebook page and sell illegal car modifications over facebook sales groups.
>Some contries enforce regulations on what tyres are deemed road-legal, due to requirements on safety and minimum grip. It's also why it's illegal to drive around with bald tyres.
Yes, this is a good thing. Where it becomes bad is when someone says "Oh, we should stop that from happening, let's ban the sell of such tires." With no exception.
This isn't a problem unique to regulations and laws. In software development, it is very common for the user to not think about exceptions. The rare the exception, the more likely it is missed in the requirements. It is the same fundamental problem of not thinking about all the exception cases, just in different contexts. You also see this commonly in children learning math. They'll learn and blindly apply a rule, not remembering the exceptions they were told they need to handle (can't divide by zero being a very common one).
A better example might be mattresses. There are states (Kansas) where it is illegal to sell a used mattress, under any circumstances. Even if, for your specific circumstances, the "it's unsanitary" reasoning isn't valid. You, as an individual, cannot sell your "I slept in it a few times and realized I don't like it" mattress to your friend.
Do you have a link to an actual Kansas statute which makes it illegal to sell a used mattress? I searched for it without success. Various sites claim that Kansas makes this illegal without citing a statute (often in the context of hokey stories about people finding silly loopholes in this purported law), but I'm suspicious that it's an urban legend.
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>In some motorsports you want tires with no tread (slicks)
You are wrong.
Laws prohibit selling used tires because the consumable part of the tire that contains the part engineered to safely interact with the road is used up. That part happens to contain the tread.
A "slick" for racing is not a tire that has had the tread worn down FFS. A "slick" still has a significant quantity of rubber engineered to wear down over use as you drive on it.
If you are using a used up tire in place of an actual racing tire, what you are doing is cheaping out on safety.
A tire worn down to the tread wear indicator or similar is only useful as a burnout tire.
Cheaping out on safety in auto racing is so damn stupid that even the 24 Hours of Lemons race, which bans cars that cost more than 500$ with all upgrades, excludes safety equipment from that calculation and requires thousands of dollars of safety equipment.
Exactly because of situations like this, where people who say they "Know what they are doing" just don't.
>ut the law prohibits the sale because it takes no account of the context.
The law prohibits it because every dumb asshole who thinks the government is an evil bogeyman like this will insist on buying worn out tires "For racing" and putting them on their daily driver and people will die. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestone_and_Ford_tire_contro... for what happens when tires are even just a little messed up, and how it killed 238 people in the US alone. Both companies involved BTW neglected to inform the NHTSA about the issues they knew existed, because people dying in their vehicles while they point fingers around is more profitable than doing a recall
>A tire worn down to the tread wear indicator or similar is only useful as a burnout tire.
Correct. And thats a motorsport.