Travel warning: Exposing possible tire danger

FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) -- More than 41 million Americans will drive somewhere for Thanksgiving this week, but before you hit the road, we have a warning that could save your life.

By the time Pablo Ruvalcaba knew what happened, his SUV, and his heart, were crushed. His wife of 27 years, the mother to his three children, died in the passenger seat next to him when their SUV flipped in traffic. Through a translator, he explained the cause of the crash was obvious.

"A tire burst," Ruvalcaba said.

He had bought the tire just days before, and the tread looked good, but more than half of it came off as he drove. Turns out, the newly sold tire was nearly 15 years old.

"There was absolutely no way for the consumer to really know, when you have a tire with this much tread, that the tire is an old tire," said his attorney, Rob Ammons.

But if you look past the tread, and know how to crack the code, you'll find what may be the most important information about your tires.

"You'll see a 'DOT' right here," said tire mechanic Jay Smith, of Rick's Tires. "There's a series of 12 numbers. It's the last four you want to be concerned with."

Those four digits tell you the week and the year your tire was manufactured.

So you'll see the tires on one of our Action News Explorers were made in the fifth week of 2014, so they're about 10 months old.

But we found a lot older tires for sale at used car lots around Fresno. One we saw is nine years old, made in August 2005.

Most manufacturers recommend tires should be replaced every 10 years, so it's still got a year to go, but at Rick's Tires in Downtown Fresno, they'd usually advise against that potentially money-saving purchase.

"Because do you really want to put the cheapest tire on your two-ton vehicle that's carrying your family at 80 miles an hour, you know?" Smith said. "Do you really want to put a $25 tire on that?"

The NTSB is considering a requirement to make the tire's age easier to figure out, a change that could've drastically affected Ruvalcaba's life.

"He thinks they should have done this before," his translator said before Ruvalcaba finished: "I would have never purchased that tire."