Potholes named the biggest road safety challenge for Australian drivers, says Continental Tyres boss
Continental Tyres Australia's managing director Mitchell Golledge has told CarExpert that deteriorating road conditions, particularly in Victoria, pose a greater danger to motorists than tyre technology itself, as regional operators report record demand for wheel and tyre repairs.
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Tyre company points to roads, not products, as the key danger
The managing director of Continental Tyres Australia, Mitchell Golledge, has identified deteriorating road conditions as the biggest road safety issue facing Australian drivers when it comes to tyres, telling CarExpert in an Expert Insights interview that "it's got nothing to do with tyres. It's actually road conditions. The state of the roads, particularly [in] Victoria, means that a tyre in a car has a hard time trying to perform in any conditions like that." 1
Speaking to CarExpert, Golledge contrasted the road network with the challenges tyre makers face themselves. While the industry is developing products that work with the weight and torque output of electric vehicles, he said those hurdles were being overcome through research and development. "But if you're talking about the Australian environment at the moment, I would say road conditions are the biggest challenge for drivers," he said, according to the CarExpert interview. 1
The warning comes against a fatal backdrop: CarExpert reports that last month a 71-year-old man was killed on a regional highway in Victoria after losing control of his motorcycle when he struck a pothole. 1
Victorian operators report surge in pothole damage
The scale of the problem in regional Victoria is documented by tyre service businesses themselves. In Ballarat, Evan Armstrong of Ballarat Mobile Tyres told The Courier he had dealt with more than 200 smashed wheels and rims in the past two weeks alone, describing it as "the worst year by far" in a decade of industry experience. He said the workload was so heavy he had to bring in extra help, and that damage was frequently not limited to one wheel: "Nine times out of 10 if you hit a pothole, it's on the one side of the car and you're going to do both wheels," he told The Courier. 2
Armstrong also flagged a growing complication for stranded drivers. "A lot of cars don't come with a spare wheel now," he told The Courier, noting he had seen one pothole snap two rims in half, and had helped a driver on the Western Freeway whose car was blown off a jack by the wind from a passing truck. 2
RACV Automotive Services general manager Makarla Cole told 3AW Breakfast that the problem in Victoria was getting worse, not better. "We've had some pretty big potholes that have done significant damage where RACV was called out and we ended up towing more than 20 or 30 vehicles in a single morning," she said, according to 3AW, which also reported that the state's worst flat-tyre hotspots had been identified amid what it described as a road maintenance crisis. 4
Costly repairs and limited recourse for Victorian drivers
The financial toll on individual motorists can be substantial. The Courier recounts the experience of a Ballarat driver, David, who hit what he described as a "monster" pothole on the Western Freeway at Brown Hill on August 20, initially expecting a $400 to $500 repair for a wheel alignment and rim repair, only to learn the car had two cracked rims and possible damage underneath. After the pothole was patched that night, The Courier witnessed it re-emerging within a week. 2
Compensation options are constrained. Under the Road Management Act 2004, The Courier reports that both the Department of Transport and Planning and the City of Ballarat are not liable for property damage caused by road condition equal to or less than a threshold of $1681 for the 2026-27 financial year. David told the publication he had to lodge an 'at fault' insurance claim for hitting an object on the road and pay his excess. 2
Victorian Premier Ben Carroll acknowledged the government needed to do more when visiting Ballarat, telling a media conference on August 14, as reported by The Courier: "What I've done immediately is put a civil engineer in charge of our roads. We're investing a billion dollars every year into our road maintenance program... we need to make sure we do the sealing right, the packing, all the materials." 2
A British mirror: record repair bills in the UK
The pattern Golledge describes is echoed overseas. Kwik Fit's latest annual Pothole Impact Tracker report, as covered by Eurekar, found UK drivers spent a total of £1.8 billion on pothole-related repairs over the past twelve months, the highest total since monitoring began in 2013 and above the previous record of £1.7 billion in 2022. Some 12.8 million drivers suffered damage in the past year, with an average repair bill of £137.40, according to the report. 3
The most common repairs in the UK data were to tyres (56 per cent of damage instances), wheels (32 per cent) and suspension components (24 per cent), Eurekar reports, with one in eight affected drivers needing their car recovered by a breakdown vehicle. Notably, Kwik Fit's research found a third of drivers whose cars were damaged said the issue only became apparent days after the impact, and more than five million drivers said they had damaged their car after hitting a pothole they thought was merely a puddle. 3
Kwik Fit operations director Dan Joyce urged a simple precaution that mirrors Golledge's message: ensuring tyres are at the correct pressure. "Tyre and wheels obviously take the brunt of the impact, but it's easy to forget that the air inside the tyre plays a crucial role in cushioning the force from hitting a pothole," he said, according to Eurekar, adding that lower-profile tyres popular on modern vehicles have a smaller volume of air to absorb impacts. Joyce also encouraged drivers to check what is in their spare wheel well, given many modern cars ship without one. 3
Hidden damage and the case for regular checks
Tyre safety organisation TyreSafe has previously warned that pothole strikes can cause problems beyond visible damage. Following research by consumer watchdog Which? finding that councils across England and Wales paid £22.8 million in compensation in 2012 for pothole-related vehicle damage, TyreSafe chairman Stuart Jackson said buckled wheels or lumps in a tyre are the most obvious signs requiring professional attention, "however, hidden problems such as cracked alloys can be just as dangerous," as reported by Vertu Motors. 5
Jackson advised motorists to monitor tyre pressures in the days after striking a pothole, noting that even a gradual pressure loss should raise alarm, because low pressure harms handling and cornering and makes tyres more likely to overheat and suffer rapid deflation, according to the Vertu Motors report. He also recommended checking for hairline fractures in alloy wheels, which can let air escape, and urged drivers in doubt to have wheels and tyres professionally inspected. 5
Back in Australia, Golledge's advice to CarExpert was similarly direct about what drivers themselves can do. "Inflation of tyres to the correct pressure, and checking of tyres on a regular basis, is probably the fundamental thing that we don't do in the Australian marketplace," he said. "We should do it once a week, but we don't." For Australian drivers, the practical picture that emerges from these separate accounts is consistent: roads are causing more damage, spare wheels are often absent, hidden damage may take days to appear, and correct tyre pressure remains the one variable most directly in a driver's control. 15
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Why these labels?Potholes are the greatest danger to motorists, says tyre company
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