Category Archives: Tyre Safety

Tyre Safety

Win A PurePotions Hamper worth up to £50

To help us create a female friendly support message for this year’s Tyre Safety Month marketing campaign, ‘Bad Air Day’ we are delighted to be partnering with PurePotions to promote their range of natural hair products as part of our #TyreSafetyMonth activities.

As everyone knows, when your hair feels and looks neglected, we feel the same and it affects our personal confidence levels.

Now imagine how your car feels when its tyres have been neglected and they don’t have enough air in them to do their job properly! They don’t perform as well and it’s definitely a ‘Bad Air Day’ in terms of your motoring safety.

Our Competition With PurePotions

Thanks to Brighton business PurePotions, we are running a competition to draw attention to this topic. One lucky winner will receive a hamper of their natural products worth up to £50 including their Natural Shampoo, Natural Conditioner, Scalp Oil with borage and rosemary, Intensive Facial Oil and Seabuckthorn hand cream.

All you have to do is enter the Facebook competition at the FOXY Lady Drivers Club Page, which we posted on 6 October, LIKING and commenting as requested.

Alternatively use our jolly video link to cheer you up with tips!

A Bad Air Day

 We’re anxious to alert women drivers to the fact that safe car tyres need taking care of, especially by checking the AIR pressure in them regularly.

This is because, when your car tyres aren’t properly inflated, they can’t grip or hold the road well enough so you feel this through your car’s bad road handling. When your tyres are over or under-inflated, your car is a harder steer, you’ll wear out expensive tyres and you’ll use more fuel BUT what matters most is the fact that your tyres will not perform well enough when you need them to brake in an emergency. And the wrong air pressure MIGHT cause an accident that could have been avoided if you’d taken better care of your tyres.

About Hair And Air Care…

Award-winning PurePotions was founded by Brighton mum Natalie Balmond in her search for an effective, safe, natural and non-steroidal moisturiser to treat her daughter’s chronic dry skin condition. All Pure Potions products are fragrance-free, paraben-free, not tested on animals and made in their UK workshop so you can be sure that you know exactly what is going on your sensitive skin.

competition terms and conditions.

Here’s how to check your tyre tread.

Here’s how to find your correct tyre pressure.

Here’s where to choose a FOXY Lady Approved tyre centre that has signed a promise to ‘never overcharge, patronise or sell you anything you don’t need.’ They will check your tyres for free, advise you about the right tyres if you need new ones AND give you a free gift membership of FOXY Lady Drivers Club in exchange for your feedback about their customer service.

If not for you, perhaps a wife, partner or daughter might be helped here? Here’s where to either join The Club yourself or buy her the gift of improved motoring knowledge.

Tyre Safety

2017 Tyre Safety Recognition Awards

Thank you Tyresafe for another brilliantly well-organised Tyre Safety Conference followed by Awards ceremony held at The Belfry Resort in Wishaw.

This is always a great occasion to pay tribute to the many organisations that are raising the tyre safety standard ahead of others.

It also encourages new tyre businesses to come on board and work towards better and wider coverage of the tyre safety message during Tyre Safety Month, October 2017.
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Of particular note are three award winning tyre safety entries I’d like to draw attention to.

Bridgestone Tyres

The Outstanding Achievement Award, sponsored by Highways England, went to Bridgestone Tyres for its pioneering Driveguard Tyre technology.

For motorists who don’t drive cars with run flat tyres (run flat tyres are likely to be on BMWs and some sporty Mercedes) but whose car has a Tyre Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS) – fit Bridgestone’s Driveguard Tyres and a dashboard light will warn you about any imminent tyre puncture.

The clever bit is that the damaged tyre maintains pressure for a range of 50 miles, providing you don’t exceed 50mph – that’s plenty of time to get you safely off a motorway, perhaps, and to a garage to sort it out.

The peace of mind this gives is considerable – in theory you’ll never clamber into a car and attempt to drive with a flattish tyre that’s unsafe to drive.

Please see what FOXY thought of the Driveguard tyre when I reviewed it.

Westgate Tyres

The Independent Garage Award, sponsored by Kumho Tyre UK, went to Westgate Tyres in Morecambe.

Not only was this a popular Award because it went to a FOXY Lady Approved Tyre Centre but also because it involved Jane Bailey, FOXY’s Woman of the Year (2017).

To see why we singled out Jane Bailey and Westgate Tyres earlier this year, please read our blog.

Protyre

The Tyre Retailer Award, sponsored by Pirelli Tyres Ltd, went to the Protyre network of 108 fastfit garage centres across England, Scotland and Wales.

Another popular award with us because Protyre Centres are FOXY Lady Approved ie female friendly garages above others.

They demonstrate a clear commitment to customer service (proven by feedback), invest in quality standards, as in the CTSI (Chartered Trading Standards Institute) Code of Practice operated by The Motor Ombudsman, and work tirelessly (no pun intended haha) with the likes of Police and Fire services to check tyre safety standards and raise motorists’ education of this subject.
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With a projected 1 in 4 vehicles likely to have illegal ie dangerous tyres, there has never been a more important time to communicate a tyre safety message to motorists.

So to all the Tyresafe Awards entrants and supporters, keep up the good work and here’s to ongoing improvements to road safety and accident statistics due to all our efforts. Otherwise these will continue to affect innocent motorists, their passengers and pedestrians more likely due to ignorance rather than wilfulness.

FOXY

Feel free to publish, share or link to our tyre safety advice for women please. The more that read this, the better the female knowledge base.

If you’re a tyre centre who’d like to be FOXY Lady Approved please download details from the bottom of this website page/link.

Tyre Safety

Tyre safety alert

We’ve all seen cars with flat tyres, presumably without the driver’s knowledge.

The one we’ve pictured here was of a car in a side street near our office in Steyning, just a couple of weeks ago.

It was so bad we had to leave a message on the windscreen although you’d think they’d know/sense this immediately when driving because the car will feel strange surely and be VERY hard to handle.

What the driver mustn’t realise is that an under (or over) inflated tyre makes their car dangerous as it’s more prone to accidents and/or tyre failure. Affecting innocent passengers, other motorists and pedestrians alike – it doesn’t bear thinking about.

Which is why our advice is ‘Never risk it… always check your tyres regularly.’

A good habit to get into is to walk around your car regularly to check the condition of all tyres before you get in and drive. This is a simple discipline but you’ll soon spot a low pressure tyre and chances are you can either top it up yourself or get an early puncture repaired for little or no money.

Whereas if you don’t spot a slowly deflating tyre, neglect it and drive on regardless you are likely to end up having to buy a new tyre and of course you’ll have struggled to steer the car safely in the meantime.

A puncture is always inconvenient of course but it can also be frightening, especially if it manifests itself as a blowout – on a motorway journey perhaps?

So much so we’ve written some tyre safety tips to help you avoid or cope with punctures – and because there are some new developments in this area which might mean you have no spare tyre (do you know if you have one?) and that you’re expected to repair a puncture with what looks like a can of hairspray…

tyreweld_puncture_kit_400

Would you know how to?

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You can find out more about tyre safety matters at our website.

Here’s where to find a FOXY Lady Approved ie female friendly Tyre Centre if preferred.

Tyre Safety

Tyre Safety Month #TSM16 Facebook competition

tyreweld_facebook-competition_oct400We are offering a special Tyre Safety Month gift hamper of motoring items as a competition prize at our Facebook page between 1 and 31 October 2016.

Did you know that some nine million cars get a puncture every year and that about half of us don’t know how to change a wheel or what to do if our car broke down on a motorway hard shoulder.

Clearly they won’t find the answer to all these problems in this gift hamper but they’d be able to ask FOXY Lady Drivers Club for advice, were they a Club member.

What the #TSM gift hamper contains

This competition prize has been donated by Holts (whose slogan is ‘Problem Solved’) and includes a range of products you’d need if you got stuck by the roadside.

It comes in an attractive metal toolbox-like exterior and includes:
+ a 400ml bottle of puncture canister Tyreweld plus instructions
+ Holts De-Icer
+ Screen wash and Screenies
+ an emergency foil blanket
+ mini first aid kit
+ a Trek protein flapjack (which we’ve had to hide in case of hunger pangs in the office…)

We’re also adding in a gift membership of FOXY Lady Drivers Club with all our insurance, car buying and motoring special offers plus VIP services and friendly support when things get stressful.

Please tell us what you think of this gift hamper presentation and content so we can feed this back to Holts on your behalf.

Is this something you might buy for yourself, or as a gift? And if so, how much would you pay?

By all means enter the competition at Facebook or tell us what you think at Twitter (where we’re @FOXYtweets).

FOXY

PS: You’ll need to know that the minimum legal tyre tread is 1.6mm – you can check this using a 2Op coin. Just enter it in the tread and looking at it sideways (across the tread) if you can see any of the coin rim your tyre may be illegal or very close.

Tyre Safety

Red Card for Leandra re part worn tyre sales

leandra_tyreAfter her father was prosecuted in April 2015 and fined £26000 for selling illegal tyres under the business name of Moss Tyres in Grantham you’d expect co-worker daughter Leandra McKenzie to have learned an important lesson.

But clearly not.

Following complaints from local residents, Lincolnshire Trading Standards conducted a test purchase a mere two months later, in June 2015, when they were sold two illegal part worn tyres by Ms McKenzie.

Neither tyres were stamped correctly (to show they had at least been checked, as far as the UK system goes) and one tyre had a deep cut through the tread making it dangerous.

Ms McKenzie was ordered to pay fines and costs of just over £8,000 when convicted in late August 2016.

Never buy part worn tyres

As tempting as it might be to buy cheap tyres, we recommend that members NEVER buy used tyres called PART WORN. That’s because you never know where they’ve been before they might get fitted to your car.

Advice from TyreSafe charity’s Chairman Stuart Jackson is to reconsider buying a part worn tyre because there are cheap new budget tyres available at similar prices. Not only are new tyres ALWAYS the safer choice but they’ll last longer and represent better value for money.

But if a motorist is still tempted to buy used tyres, she should make sure that they carry the words PART WORN stamped on the tyres. If not, these tyres are unlikely to have been checked as fit for sale and the retailer is already breaking the law.

Andy Wright, Principal Trading Standards Officer at Lincolnshire County Council, said: “Two things are particularly concerning here. First, that as the tyres failed to have the correct labelling on – with no distinction whether they were part worn or not – consumers had no idea what they were buying. Secondly, the damage to the tyre meant its structure could have been compromised. This tyre could have had life-threatening consequences for innocent motorists, their families and other road users.

Red Card Award

red_card_leandra_400FOXY says – Given that she knew the law and had seen her father suffer the consequences of selling illegal tyres it is particularly galling that Leandra would ignore this warning.

Not just that, she also seemed to get off relatively lightly here compared to her father.

Whilst it’s rare for us to award Red Cards for bad behaviour, we have no hesitation in handing one out to Leandra on two counts.

1/ For selling a product that she knew could kill an innocent motorist.

2/ For letting her gender (and her family) down. She should have known better and cared more. Especially after seeing her father humiliated in this way.

As the UK’s only everyday motoring club representing the best interests of women drivers, we are deeply ashamed of you Leandra.

For more information

If you’d like to know more about tyre safety matters please visit www.partworn-tyres.co.uk

FOXY

PS: During Tyre Safety Month (October 2016) we have a lot of practical information available to help you understand this vital subject better and to reward you for having your tyres checked by a FOXY Lady Approved garage and/or tyre centre. Always best to join FOXY Lady Drivers Club to have this support on hand and from within.