How Customizing Your Vehicle Can Increase The Likelihood Of Rollovers

Essentially we’re talking about physics and the aerodynamics of your vehicle and it’s common sense that’s going to tell you that if your vehicle is skinnier and it’s taller, it’s going to be more likely to roll over and that’s why cars and trucks are specifically designed in a way that will hopefully prevent that from occurring. The whole engineering behind all of it is that they’re trying to keep you as safe as humanly possible.

What happens is people get vehicles and they customize their vehicles as you’re certainly entitled to do as a consumer. Specifically what I’m talking about is when people go out and they customize their tires. You don’t really think about it. You go out and you get a nice set of rims and you get the tires to match and you get the vehicle and you get it looking the way that you want it to.

What you’ve actually done is you’ve altered the factory settings of what the car was supposed to be when it was on the road and you have unknowingly made it more likely that your car is going to roll over and let me demonstrate with just a hypothetical example.

Take for instance you’re driving in a Ford Explorer. The typical wheel base for a Ford Explorer is supposed to be I think 57.5 inches between the two wheels.

When you go out and you get the customized rims and the tires that come with it, you can actually narrow the wheel base by as little as an inch. In doing so, let’s say hypothetically you’re taking a right turn at 45 degrees and it has been raining recently.

If you have the standard wheel base that the factory intended when the car was originally issued, you’re going to go through that and you’re not going to roll over.

But if you get those customized wheels that are slightly thinner and it reduces the wheel base by as little as an inch, you can take that 45-degree angle and you can bring it to where you’re going to flip at a 26 to 27-degree angle and the car is going to roll over and you’re potentially going to be hurt.

So my message to you and my public service announcement as a practicing personal injury attorney is be very careful when you’re customizing your vehicle and make sure that you take this sort of factor into account and try to keep the factory settings as far as the wheel base is concerned, so that you can prevent yourself from being injured in the future.

If you have questions please contact the Hartman Law Firm at 843-300-7600.