Tire maintenance, hub caps in the way

Soon. She is at the stage where she often drives a little slower than she should (like 28 in a 35), but other than that, she still seems to be OK. Keeps the car in the lane, doesn't wander side to side in the lane, looks for and sees pedestrians, signals, stops at reasonable distances, no tailgating. She only goes on city streets now. Still, reaction times can't be great. We're trying to get her to use Uber more and drive less.

Honestly, I see much worse drivers every day, few of whom are elderly. A lot of them drive Teslas and other EVs. Those are constantly cutting me off and zooming by way past the speed limit. Maybe having all that acceleration on tap is too tempting for some drivers.

 

So, I drive home, and while I'm on the road she runs over a piece of road debris which tears a hole in the sidewall in the driver's side rear. It must have been going thump thump and she heard it since the TPMS is not working. (She called me but I didn't pick up as I thought it was just the "are you home yet call", which can wait until, you know, I'm home. Also I was in heavy traffic at the time.) AAA comes out, tries to pump it up, which of course fails, and then tows her to (I think) the America's Tire outlet. This is at around 4:00 PM. They look at the tire, see a hole in the sidewall and tell her it has to be replaced. So far by the book. The tires on the car are some Bridgestone Ecopia variant, purchased from and installed by Costco, and are less than a year old. Whatever they are, they don't have any of that model in the store. This is the problem with the time, had it been in the morning they could have probably gotten one the same day. Unless the variant is some Costco only model, don't know how that would be handled. She just wants to go home and tells them to put anything that will fit on it. They haul out a "Continental True Contact Tour", hopefully the exact same size as the other tires, but maybe not even that, and put it on. $230, for the one tire. She drives home.

I'm thinking the blown tire may have had a road damage warranty of some sort, in which case getting the right one put on maybe won't cost too much more, but might have to be done at Costco. But I don't know, I have never bought tires from Costco. It probably won't hurt anything to roll around with different types of tires on the rear for a few days. Long term, to me seems like a bad idea.

Thoughts?