Last night while cruising down the 101 one of my new rear SO2s blew. All of a sudden the car became unstable and smoke was coming out the back. Changed to the temp spare and limped home. Here

 

Wow, that is pretty drastic! Good to hear you kept the car under control. Do you suspect a manufacturing defect?

 

That IS pretty bad.

 

Damn thats the weirdest point of seperation on that tire - I'd say defect unless something flew up at your car at a weird angle and sliced through the tire...without doing any damage to the surrounding paint which is unlikely. I say defect and get 03s

 

That is what a tire looks like after it is run on low air pressure. My guess is that the tires was loosing air pressure from some source, could be a nail,bad valve stem or something on the road. The tire can only take so much heat and they they either blow out or delaminate.
No tire mfg warrantys this type of problem. We can offer a customer accomodation on a situation like this.
Jim

 

Ok, here

 

When there is a disparity in the tire pressures between the rear tires the S2000 will pull to one side under acceleration. This may help people recognize a situation like this in the future.

 

That's exactly what happened. I was coming up an on ramp where they had just resurfaced the road and are still working on it and thought it was that. I now know better and will be aware of it.

Glad you pointed that out. This is the kind of information that makes this board so great.

 

It's probably not important to you any more, but when a rear tire blows you should move a front tire to the blown position and put the doughnut on the front. The difference in diameters of the spare with the original tire plays havoc with the differential apparently. Maybe you did this...just didn't sound like it from your post...thought I'd chime in .

 

That's good to know too, for the future. I was lucky I only had to drive less than 1/2 mi slowly.