I had a look at the report of the single incident you link to. The tyre in that incident was over 18 years old, so its failure doesn't provide any support for your implication that 10 years is too old on a commercial vehicle.

Its unclear what the evidence was that age caused the failure, and it may have just been assumed, because the tyre was so old.

It is, however, stated that the failure could not have been anticipated (apart, presumably, from an age check of the tyre if that is accepted as the main cause of the failure). This is inconsistent with another (linked) report, here:-

M5 crash van had 18-year-old tyres, inquest hears - BBC News

This mentions "cuts to the tread area, not caused in the collision, as well as micro-cracks.", and that the tyre had been the subject of an MOT advisory, though its unclear if these defects were its content

Perhaps more significantly, its also stated that the tyre pressure hadn't been checked for a year, and its not clear how or if this is excluded as a factor in the failure, since significant underinflation could have damaged the tyre in its past even if it was correctly inflated at the time of the accident.

This also illustrates a difficulty in attributing failures to simple tyre age even with large scale historical failure statistics, since (prior to TPMS being generally deployed anyway) an older tyre has been potentially exposed to abuse such as chronic underinflation for longer, and there is survey evidence that such abuse has been commonplace..

This COULD be addressed by large scale comparative real world testing of unused new and old tyres, but thats expensive, and involves some potential ethical/PR issues if your old tyre tester had a crash, so I wouldn't bet much money on that having been done

Edited by edlithgow on 01/09/2024 at 15:46