When you drive a company car, it is the company’s responsibility to perform (and pay for) all normal maintenance.

What would you do if your boss kept telling you that your company car didn’t need new tires even though they were getting to the point where they were illegal to drive on?

That is what happened to the print engineer in this story, so he finally just refused to drive any longer, which caused major problems for the company and the owner to get upset with his boss.

Here are the details.

I can’t have new tires on my company vehicle? Watch your business grind to a halt!

I work in a small printer/photocopier repair company. There’s the owner, my boss, me and another engineer.

Following chain of command is generally a good idea.

The owner of the company is adamant about following the chain of command, we must NOT go above my bosses head to report issues and instead send everything through him, who in turn will inform the owner…

Previous attempts to report issues directly to the owner about my incompetent boss have been met with meeting talking about MY lack of respect for the chain of command… This will become important later.

In January the tyres on my company car were starting to look a bit shabby, so with plenty of time before they became dangerous I asked my boss if we could get a new set put on.

My boss says “Nah! They’ve got plenty of tread left on them yet! They’ll be fine.”

Bald tires are very unsafe.

I leave it for about 3 months because I did alert him quite early.

At this stage in the story my boss will be going on holiday in a few days and by this point the tires are really getting close to needing replaced, the minimum legal limit in the UK is 1.6mm, at this point stopping distances are increased by two car lengths, so before he goes on holiday I ask him to come and look at my tires again because I think I am in need of some new ones.

He says that they’re fine again and explains to me that they have X amount of mm left before I need new ones, despite only looking with his eye.

Why is he so against putting new tires on?

He goes on holiday for two weeks and in that time I do roughly another 500 miles. When he returns I tell him again that I think I need new tires – again, no joy.

Fast forward to this Monday!

It is getting to the point where he should just refuse to drive.

I say to him that they are bordering on illegal and it’s very unsafe to drive, I could get points on my license, fined or even worse hurt myself or someone else on the roads, I really expressed my concern but this time he told me that they were looking “a bit low” and we’d check them weekly from now on.

I get home that night and find an 8 inch high slit in my tire with the metal mesh that holds the tires shape protruding out.

This combined with the fact the tires were extremely low on tread (very close to, if not illegal) prompted me to refuse to drive the car the next morning, giving my reasons for not driving it as the 8 inch slit in the tire with metal pegs protruding out, lack of tread and that my windscreen washers don’t work (that will cause a car to fail an MOT).

Now it is impacting business.

That morning my boss and the other engineer had to drive about 150 miles to another city to install a series of photocopiers for an important new customer and I was going to cover any breakdown calls that may come in whilst they were away.

Due to my refusal to drive my now illegal company vehicle those plans had to be scrapped and the customers install of new machines had to be put off to the following week, this of course made them extremely angry and the owner of the company received the brunt of their calls, finding out from them that the installs were cancelled and not my incompetent boss.

You can’t drive around on a spare anyway.

Due to the company being generally cheap and my boss trying to cover his own back for not getting the tires sorted at any of the previous opportunities I gave him he didn’t call out a recovery service to tow me to a garage or fit tires at my house.

Instead he told the other engineer to drive 50 miles to my house to fit the spare from his car, to my car, despite me telling my boss it wouldn’t fit but when did he ever listen to anyone else.

The other engineer arrives and of course, the spare from his car didn’t fit and my stupid boss formulated a new plan.

We would take the wheel off my car, drive 50 miles back to a guys garage he knows round the corner from our office and get him to put a new tire on the wheel THEN drive 50 miles back to my house and fit the tire ourselves.

The amount of time and money wasted on this is insane.

This whole process took us from about 8:30AM till 2PM between getting caught in traffic, waiting at the garage etc.

During this time the owner had two engineers off the road and unable to attend calls and a new important customer who was angrily calling him wondering where his nice new shiny photocopiers were.

My boss explained that there was some kind of emergency situation with my car that required both me and the other engineer to get it fixed (leaving out the parts that incriminated himself).

Oh, nice. He is trying to blame this guy for the trouble.

When I got back to the office I was interrogated about why I had caused the company to grind to a halt and why because of ME the new customer was livid. I explained the situation to him exactly as I have to you and his words were “if your car was in need of tires that bad why didn’t you come and ask me?!”

I simply quoted that I “should NOT go above my bosses head to report issues but instead allow him to report to the owner.”

Finally they are taking the car maintenance seriously (and fixing a dumb policy).

My car is booked in next week for a whole new set of tires, wheel alignment and a general check to see if anything else is needed. The chain of command rule is now gone and I assume my boss is in a world of trouble.

Please take a lesson from this malicious compliance, which I should have listened too sooner, do not allow anyone to force you to drive on unsafe tires. It could harm the vehicle, you and others around you. Always be safe!

Driving on unsafe tires is a major hazard and in many places it is illegal. No boss can demand that you put your life in danger like this.

Let’s see what the people in the comments have to say about it.

This person might be on to something here.

Right, he is making a big deal about nothing.

This commenter has a great idea.

This is good information.

A good alignment is essential for keeping your tires nice.

His boss is willing to put this employee’s safety on the line.

That’s not cool.

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.