The problem was less that we had to replace it and more that it was a fairly significant distance away. (A distance made longer because we weren’t on the freeway but heavily trafficked roads in a tourist-heavy area.) We were near downtown Gatlinburg, and there were places that were closer, but they were all closed because it was a Sunday.
We also would have had a better shot at not having our tire blow out if the closest gas station wasn’t 10 miles away.
15 miles is nothing on a spare tire. I'm not sure how many poor people you've spent time around, but I regularly see Nissan sedans driving around with multiple spare donuts on them.
Oh I know. Carlos Ghosn got them to focus more on the fleet market. I'll always be a Toyota/Lexus man, but I owned a Datsun wagon for a while and I followed the industry closely when I ran an import repair shop (which was never open on a Saturday or Sunday).
It's wild how that one man managed to change the entire path of a once great brand.
I think of it as one too many levels of management. At some point, your nearest understanding of the business is powerpoints about powerpoints about powerpoints... and then dumb ideas start to seem reasonable.
We also would have had a better shot at not having our tire blow out if the closest gas station wasn’t 10 miles away.