The obvious can pass your mind sometimes
 

My grandfather is always hounding my tail b/c he says "taking the spare and jack out of your car is stupid, you will wish you had it when you blow a tire"

This may be true for trips but not for everyday driving...

Reason: I am on HIS insurance and I pay more to have road side assistance...

If anyone here is scared of taking the spare out, do you have road side? if so, now you should feel comfortable taking that extra 20/25 lbs out of the car.

This should be obvious but some may not even think about it (like my g-pa)

I disagree wholeheartedly. Not to be rude, but I think the fuel you save is insignificant in the grand scheme of things...

*time to wait for wrecker - YOU pay this, late for work, getting somewhere, or whatever, sometimes an hour or more

Other things you don't pay for but we all do...
Gas the wrecker uses to get to you and get you to tire shop or your home
Emissions from wrecker
Traffic backups from onlookers at the wrecker hitching your car up

I'm all about going for it and doing whatever to save, but this idea feels like a loser in the long run. If you're doing it for the environment, it's obviously bad, and if you're doing it for money savings, I can mail you a check for $2.00. That's probably all you'll save over a couple years.

yeah the time you spend waiting is the killer. it can be at little at 10 mins, or up to a few hours, as i once experienced.

to me, it's not worth the time waiting, and i am about as cheap as they come in regards to saving fuel. i always carry an aluminum spare, jack, tire iron, air pump, and a patch kit. it adds extra weight, but 99% of the time i can patch a tyre while it is still on the car, and then keep on going like nothing happened. usually in 10 mins or less.

Yer better off just keeping yer gas tank at 1/3rd to half full... ;)

If you always drive in areas that have cell service with a charged cell phone then sure, but once a tow truck shows up to help you with your flat tire then what do you do? if you had a spare in your truck they would change it for you, now they either tow you back to your house.
I got a flat once while out of state with no spare, it was 10pm on a saturday night, lucky for us the tow truck driver lived only half an hour drive away and took us to his house where he sold us a used tire and wheel, otherwise we would have had the joy of hanging out till the fallowing monday morning for a shop to open up that could sell us a set of new tires, if we had a spare with us we could have fixed it our selves and saved 3 hours, if the tow truck driver wasn't so nice it would have cost us 36 hours.
I also use my jack all the time to look under my car and the cars of other people to see if a wheel bearing is going out, to unstick stuck parking brakes, to fix a tire that had a bulge in it and caused the car to shake violently and to fix the exhaust.

I know my luck... it usually ain't good. But I was able to go several years with no spare/tools and I had no bad tire incident come up either. If you know your track record- how many flats have you suffered?- you can come up with sort of an idea of what the odds are you will be inconvenienced with a flat. For me, when I have really good or new tires on, I simply don't have flats. I just haven't had a problem with getting flats from running over sharp objects. Now, I have had many flats, even blowouts, but that's when I run old, weatherchecked, and/or bald tires. THEN I make sure to have a good spare with tools on board. Changing out those flats has been a very minor inconvenience to me, so it's been well worth it to run those crap tires.

My tires are special order only, so when I'm more than 50mi from home, the temporary spare won't do me a lot of good. I carry a full-sized spare when I carry one at all.

I think you should keep the spare and jack in the car. Better to have it and not need it 99% of the time than to need it once and not have it. If you really need to save on weight you could stop 4 gallons short of filling up. 25 lbs of weight is trivial.

OTOH, I've had only 4 cripling flat tyres in some 600.000 km.
Two of these were caused by vandalism.

Discounting the latter, that's roughly 1 cripling flat every 300.000 km / 200.000 miles ... or 11 years !

I also say I'm in the "It's silly to go without it" side. 25 lbs of weight isn't even noticeable. Unless you're in a fuel competition (or racing) I see no reason to go without a full size spare. I once had a random, unplanned, trip into the great unknown and got a flat tire. Having to take it off, leave your car un-attended in no mans land, and roll it a couple miles (since no cars are around and there is no cell service) to a shop and having them plug it, then having to either pay 20$ for a taxi/hitchhike a ride WHILE carrying a tire OR rolling the tire back (I paid for a taxi) just isn't worth any fuel savings at all. Or monetary savings.

I'll never save that much extra fuel that was used by that ONE flat tire by taking the spare out.

If you want to save weight, just get rid of the asphault in the car. It's only purpose is to make the metal sound thicker while adding a lot of weight to the car. Most cars have this stuff in them, and it's usually in the area of 100~200 lbs you can strip out.

Even in my Jeep, the full size spare tire and rim weighs about 50 pounds. Add another 10 for the jack, and you're up to 60. In a 4200 pound vehicle, that's not enough of a difference to make any measurable FE difference, and the peace of mind is worth carrying it.

*note: I DO have my jack and spare in the trunk of my accord right now and didnt really think about pulling it out BUT I didn't have a spare in my neon b/c the guy who kidnapped me ruined the spare and thats when my g/pa would always get on me about not having a spare....

The post was really for those Super hard core hypermilers that DO care about the 25 pounds, the same ones that take out their floor mats to remove 6 pounds...

One of the nice benefits of leaving the spare at home was how huge the trunk got! I used all that volume sometimes too.

The PHEV Prius has a tire repair kit instead of a spare tire.
My Real-World Experience with PHV - The Blog - PriusChat Forums

Although if you're trying to take out weight, this is a better idea:
http://i26.tinypic.com/2wcl0g6.jpg
Not very easy but real hypermilers should try to do it. After all, obesity wastes gas...

Are you saying to take out weight, kick her out of the car and make her walk? Or better yet, push? :confused:

When my spare was out I had a can of Fix-A-Flat under the passenger seat.

That picture is an example of what hypermilers should look like. Excess fat is an unnecessary load, so take it out.

She's cute and all but I don't think I should ever look like that... :eek:

6 pounds here, 25 there, some more elsewhere ...
In the end they all add up to a sizeable weight reduction that will be noticeable.

Sad but true.
I've lost a spare tyre over the last months :cool:

Now there's something I didn't know about!! Where do I look for it? (Maybe a new thread, so this one doesn't get hijacked.)

Boy, you give up easily! If you try hard enough, you can do almost anything. ;)

Piwoslaw - Be aware, if you pull the asphalt matting out, you'll gain a lot of new road noise. It would usually be found under the carpeting, etc.

You've all hear the old rule about taking a pound from a race car.......take an ouce from sixteen places. I know a lot of guys who literally do this with touring bikes! Heck, a couple of new bolts for my friends water bottle saved him a couple of ounces and only cost about 15 bucks.:rolleyes:

But honestly, first off, how about looking for the lightest spare and jack. A super light aluminum wheel and smaller jack (aluminum?) is going to save you a bunch AND you get to have a spare.

Brian

Who said that hypermilers should not look like networking specialists? (Believe it or not, networking specialists can look like models!)

And here's one of the hypermilers who made a world record:
http://i29.tinypic.com/9tzngw.jpg

6 pounds from taking out the floormats is something I'd do. Except my car didn't come with floormats.

Members present at the SMCC economy rally in Montreal earlier this summer can attest, it would have sucked had I not have a spare in my truck. Luckily the flat happened after the run! But you never know when it'll hit you.

If it gets to the point where I should wear a bra, that means I've GAINED too much weight!

I have a problem with that. These days, with steel & kevlar belts and all that, I almost never get a flat in the tread area. It's usually a piece of road debris punching a thumb-sized hole in the sidewall, and I don't believe that there's a repair kit that will fix that sort of damage.

Well, I'd need a sex change to achieve THAT, but my waist measurement is less than either hips or chest. Which is an irritation sometimes: I get SO tired of shirts that fit like tents.

I've heard that tire service stations HATE those flat kits. The whole inside of the tire and wheel is covered with a sticky goo (latex?) and they don't want to touch it.

Lucky!!! But I'm on my way back to how I looked in collage. No, really. Only 5-7 kg and I'm there.:p

I asked my local tyre place about those repair can things and they have stuff they spray on which removes the goo quite well once the tyre is off the wheel. The whole repair just takes longer which is sometimes a pain if they are busy.

I carry all three - a can, a spare and an RAC card. Given my first car was 1680 lb and my current one is almost 800 lb more the weight I save is not worth the hassle.

I'm also the same size I was in college. Unfortunately I was a fat bugger then too.

...using todays' Politically Correct wording, that would be something more like: "...overtly robust..." or "...statuequely stout..." or "...robustly rotund...", etc.

Two words: splitting hairs. If you really cared about weight, you'd have already replaced your auto body with foam and fiberglass. Touring bikes, to me, are the most practical, like cars. They're not exactly overbuilt, but they're made to carry and last many miles. Truthfully, if you're not competing, you should keep anything worth use in an emergency, and also the money saved by driving with a few pounds off the car probably can't outweigh the money saved by overinsurance. I don't get angry at carbon fiber cyclists, but you have to put the line somewhere when it comes to practicality.

My last 2 flats wouldn't have been fixed by a can of "fix-a flat". One was a large sidewall tear, the other was when I was forced to hit a traffic island when a semi moved halfway into my lane on a curve. The impact bent the wheel rim and broke the sidewall's air seal to the metal.

I'm the answer to that age old question handed down from our ancestors :

"Who ate all the pies"

Well isht happens.

As someone else noted, when you have had none or one or two flats in 11 years, your odds are pretty good.

I am in the keep the spare crowd. The time lost waiting for someone to bring me the spare or waiting for a tow is not worth the few dollars of extra gas.

My car is 3400lbs so an extra 40 is not a big deal. The lighter weight spare/jack idea is the best compromise I heard.

The temporary spare and jack weigh in at 17.3kg - that's 38 lbs.

All in all, I tossed 26.5 kg out of the car today ;)
Then poured 17 kg of diesel back in.

I wonder how much fuel is saved by not having a tire in the back compared to having the tire in the back.

Then I wonder how much is saved by not making a tow truck come out and do something I should have been able to do myself had I not been a nitwit and neutered my ability to fend for myself.



Honda civic 2200lbs tire and jack 30? that's about 1% weight savings {sarcasam}wOOoOoo!!!111!!1! {/sarcasam} Consitering I get almost everything back from accelerating that tire and jack during my coast back down it seems hardly worth the effort to pop the floor open and lift it.

When I worked at a tire shop we would charge extra if you used fix-a-flat. due to the sticky mess that would more than double our time to clean out and do a proper repair.