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Bubble or bulge in the tire: which tires owners report it on

A raised blister where the inner liner has separated and air has entered the carcass. A bubble is a failure already in progress, not cosmetic damage.

By Mark Bishop · Last verified 2026-10-07

How common is it?

Across every NHTSA tire complaint narrative on file, bubble or bulge in the tire appears in 6%. That is the number every row below is measured against: a subject at 2× is one where owners describe this failure twice as often as the corpus average, whatever the total complaint volume.

Where it over-indexes

Tire or vehicleReports describing itShare of that subjectVs all tire complaints
Goodyear Eagle LS 2 ROF 27 84% 14.3×
BMW 535XI 13 81% 13.8×
BMW 550I 15 65% 11.1×
BMW 5 Series 20 63% 10.6×
Goodyear Eagle LS-2 45 51% 8.7×
Kumho Solus KH25 23 50% 8.5×
Acura CL 5 50% 8.5×
BMW 535I 7 47% 7.9×
KIA K5 7 47% 7.9×
Audi S4 13 46% 7.9×
Hankook Optimo H426 19 43% 7.3×
Dodge Dart 13 41% 6.9×
Subaru Impreza 10 32% 5.5×
BMW 330I 5 31% 5.3×
Audi A4 17 30% 5.1×
Ford F250 6 26% 4.4×
KIA Optima 8 26% 4.4×
Cooper Discoverer A/T 9 26% 4.4×
Dunlop SP Sport 23 24% 4.1×
Goodyear Wrangler Trailrunner AT 13 24% 4.1×
Pontiac Montana 5 24% 4.0×
Continental Conti PRO Contact 74 24% 4.0×
Honda FIT 7 23% 3.8×
KIA Soul 6 22% 3.8×
Goodyear Assurance 11 22% 3.7×

Ranked by how far the subject sits above the corpus rate, counting only subjects with at least five reports describing this failure.

In owners' own words

Verbatim excerpts from complaints filed with NHTSA about bubble or bulge in the tire across the NHTSA tire-complaint record. Reports are published by NHTSA as filed and are lightly cleaned here only to remove intake codes.

GOODYEAR RUN ON FLAT 245/40/19 GETS BUBBLE ON TIRE. I HAD TO CHANGE THE SAME TIRE WITHIN 10 DAYS WITH NO WARRANTY COVERAGE AVAILABLE. THEN A WEEK LATER HAD TO CHANGE ANOTHER TIRE WHICH IS 3 TIRES WITHIN 5,000 MILES AND COST OF $1,600.

NHTSA complaint 1003834

I PURCHASED A 2011 BMW 535I XDRIVE VEHICLE WITH GOODYEAR EAGLE LS RUNFLATS 245/40 R19. THE CAR HAS ONLY 19,000 MILES AND FROM THE DAY THAT I PURCHASED IT (IN FEB 2011), I HAVE HAD TO REPLACE THE FRONT TIRES 8 TIMES AND RECENTLY THE REAR TIRES 2 TIMES. A TOTAL OF 10 TIRE REPLACEMENTS. SOME REPLACEMENTS WERE DUE TO BUBBLES ON SIDEWALLS. THE OTHERS WERE DUE WHAT APPEARED TO BE CUTS ON THE INSIDE/OUTSIDE SIDEWALLS. I HAVE SPOKEN TO MANY BMW OWNERS OF SIMILAR VEHICLE AND EVERYONE IS RUNNING INTO THE SAME PROBLEM. GOODYEAR INITIALLY WAS REPLACING MY TIRES AT NO CHARGE BECASUE THEY TIRE DAMAGE ALWAYS WAS WITHIN TIRE WARRANTY WINDOW UNTIL LAST YEAR WHEN THEY CHANGED THEIR ROAD HAZZARD WARRANTY POLICY AND NO LONGER COVER THE EXPENSE. THESE ARE VERY EXPENSIVE TIRES. SOMETHING HAS TO BE DONE ABOUT THESE TIRES.....

NHTSA complaint 1033343 · 2011 vehicle

GOODYEAR RUN ON FLAT 245/40/19 GETS BUBBLE ON TIRE. I HAD TO CHANGE THE SAME TIRE WITHIN 10 DAYS WITH NO WARRANTY COVERAGE AVAILABLE. THEN A WEEK LATER HAD TO CHANGE ANOTHER TIRE WHICH IS 3 TIRES WITHIN 5,000 MILES AND COST OF $1,600.

NHTSA complaint 1003833 · 2011 vehicle

How to read this

Complaints are voluntarily submitted to the NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation and are not verified by NHTSA. They are owner-reported problems, not proven defects, and volume tracks how many of a tire were sold as much as how often it failed. What is comparable is the mix: which problems owners describe here versus across every tire complaint on file. That comparison, the mileage distribution and the mode rankings on this page are our analysis of the public record.

FAQ

How common is bubble or bulge in the tire in tire complaints?
It appears in 6% of all NHTSA tire complaint narratives. Individual tires vary widely around that figure, which is what the ranking on this page measures.
Which tire has the most reports of bubble or bulge in the tire?
Ranked by rate rather than raw volume, the Goodyear Eagle LS 2 ROF sits highest: 27 of its written reports describe it, 84% of that subject's narratives, about 14.3× the corpus rate. Complaint volume also tracks sales volume, so rate is the fairer comparison.
Does a high rate here mean the tire is defective?
No. NHTSA does not verify complaints, and a report is one owner's account. A high rate means owners of that tire describe this failure more often than owners of tires generally; a signal worth knowing before you buy, not a finding of defect.

Sources

Last verified 2026-10-07 against the sources below.

  1. NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation; owner complaints dataset (unverified owner reports, US federal government work, public domain).
  2. NHTSA Recalls database, nhtsa.gov/recalls.
  3. Corpus baselines computed over 58,390 complaint narratives longer than 200 characters.