Flat Tires and Rental Cars-Occam's Razor Gave Me a Flat

I just finished listening to the latest "Car Talk" on NPR. It's a very funny show and I highly recommend them. It has a little to do with cars and a lot to do with people which is actually the only reason I can handle being a used car salesman myself. I like people. Cars? Not so much.

Well, on most episodes they have a "puzzler". Sometimes it's automotive sometimes it's not. But the most recent one is automotive and it reminded me of all my years renting cars in the Twin Cities and I wanted to give the Minnesota area readers a better chance at winning this week (assuming I'm right).

As is expected when you have a lot of rental cars people get flat tires once in a while. The question then always becomes is it a problem with the rental car or did they hit something? Once in a great while a tire goes flat early into the rental and we find a slow leak caused by a nail or something. We switch cars with the customer and fix the tire. Easy.

But when someone has had a rental car for a while and then they get a flat tire they still think it was something wrong with the rental car. Since I've never seen a bad tire in 17 years of renting cars the likelihood of it being the tire is tiny.

There is a trick though to helping the person who hit something and got a flat tire realize that it actually happened to them while they had the car and as a result of their driving it. I'm guessing this is also the apparent answer to the Car Talk puzzler for episode 904. The theory goes as follows. In the winter debris gets pushed to the outside of the road by the plows. It's almost always pushed to the right. Then, when someone drives over the debris with the front right tire it bounces around until it strikes the right rear tire and punctures the tire. When it happens this way the tire usually goes flat almost instantly.

So, by guessing that the renter has a flat in the right rear tire I prepare them to accept the truth of the situation. They weren't the one in a million who had a defective tire but rather the most obvious and simplest possible cause is the most likely. They hit something. It wasn't a defective tire it was Occam's Razor.